Where You're Going
by BG Sparrow
Summary: Part I of the Time Circuits Trilogy. Emma Brown and Marty McFly become the victims of Doc's experiment gone wrong and entangled in a past that most certainly ensures slim hope for their futures. Tensions mount as they get caught up in saving themselves and Doc before the lightning strikes, never mind the thin line they were walking before the Delorean came into their lives.
1. Countdown

**_"This readout tells you where you're going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were."_**

**PART I: Where You're Going**

* * *

><p><strong>PROLOGUE<br>**_**Countdown**_

Friday, October 25, 1985  
>8:18 AM<p>

"Dad! You need to cut the green wire!"

"No, the white one, Doc!"

Emmett Brown sweated over the small ticking mechanism, a pair of pliers shaking in his hand over the jumble of multi-colored wiring in the little metal casing. His daughter and Marty pressed themselves over either one of his shoulders, further scattering his nerves with their frantic yelling.

He was not able to determine which wire would stop the time bomb from exploding if he cut it, and time was running out. Fast.

"Dad, hurry!" Emma wailed, digging her hands into his lab coat.

"Twelve seconds, Doc!"

The blue one? The white one? The yellow?

"I don't know which one!" he shouted in frustration. "There're too many!"

"Just cut one!" Emma said. "It's our only chance!"

"I can't do that!" Doc shouted incredulously. "You two better run for it!"

"There's no time!" Marty said. "Just cut one of the damn wires!"

"No!"

Emma's heart pounded faster with every _tick _of the bomb, her eyes widening as the counter changed over to two seconds.

"It's gonna blow!"

Doc and Marty looked at the timer change to the number one. Emma squeezed her eyes shut and felt her father pull her and Marty into himself, all three of their heads pushed tightly into Doc's chest.

The bomb beeped three times and then exploded.

* * *

><p>Emma shot up with a gasp, hesitantly taking in her bedroom as she panted heavily. She immediately shut her eyes again and lowered her forehead to her knees, wincing as the pain in her ears travelled down her neck. She let out one great sigh, slowly lying back down. Her head rang painfully.<p>

Emma put a hand to her head, furrowing her brow. While her father's unsuccessful attempt to dismantle a time bomb had led to quite the imaginary explosion, she wasn't entirely certain that it hadn't been some other unsuccessful attempt of his ending in a very real explosion.

It wouldn't be the first or last time it happened.

She slid out of bed, still disoriented from the pounding in her head. She wandered out of her room, through the small sitting room, and out into the hall of the lab. Running her hand along the wall to keep her balance, Emma's face fell when she rounded the corner – a mass of falling papers, billowing smoke, and a god-awful smell filled the garage. She started to choke on the stench of singed wires, pulling her shirt collar up over her nose as she shuffled up to the huge amplifier. Finished only a few weeks prior by her father, the giant square speaker sparked, fizzled, and popped, causing her to jump.

Something rustled behind her. Emma looked over her shoulder, hardly surprised when Marty emerged from under a fallen shelf with his guitar and removed his bent sunglasses. They exchanged equally stunned expressions as the last of the falling papers settled around them, Marty's eyebrows rising up into his hair. He looked from the broken amp back to her.

"Rock and roll," he said, blinking at the onset of his own headache.

Well, didn't this look familiar.

"What are you _doing_?" she growled, letting her collar drop before rubbing her face with a cough.

"Band auditions," Marty said as he staggered through the debris, laying his guitar on top of the nearby armchair. "Tryouts are today after school. I wanted to get some last-minute practice in."

Oh, yes. The band auditions for the dance next month. The whole reason this infernal amplifier had come into existence.

And now that it had served its purpose, it had permanently been decommissioned.

The spot on her head that had received a goose egg weeks ago was finally avenged.

When Marty reached her side, Emma looked at him levelly through the haze of electrical smoke. The heavy drowsiness on her face made her look quite disgruntled. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

"You're coming, right?"

"I have tutoring until four."

"It's Friday. No one goes to tutoring on Fridays."

Emma shrugged, speaking through a yawn. "Some kids are forced to. But I'll try to get out a few minutes early. Besides, my eardrums want to know what the big deal is for you to be practicing so loudly."

"It was a _little_ loud. For eight in the morning."

The fire alarm suddenly rang on a nearby wooden column. Had Emma not grown used to this sound as an incoming telephone call, she would have assumed the explosion of the amplifier had set off the alarm. She scrambled over the rubbish strewn through the lab, finally regaining her balance against the post as she picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Emma, it's me."

"Morning, Dad," she said, glancing at Marty on the other side of the post. He watched on curiously, having not heard from the scientist himself in over a week.

"Good morning, dear. I just called to tell you I'll be home later tonight. I've had a breakthrough with my work. It's the big one. I'm going to the mall tonight to perform an experiment after I get some equipment from home, and I'd like you to come."

"All right."

"Get ahold of Marty. Tell him to meet us there at 1:15."

Without missing a beat, Emma grabbed Marty by the jacket and looked over at him.

"Meet us at Twin Pines tonight at 1:15. Dad's had a breakthrough."

"He's there now?" Doc asked.

She let go of Marty, and he slipped around to her side of the post.

"Hey, Doc."

"Van Halen decided to wake me up with some 'last-minute practice' before the band auditions today."

"You haven't been using that amplifier too much, have you?" Doc asked Marty. "The chance of overload is becoming increasingly substantial. I swear I had it working perfectly, but something keeps going wrong with that damn volume dial."

Marty felt Emma staring at him expectantly, making him feel two inches tall. He chewed on his bottom lip as she smiled, holding the phone away from her ear and nodding to it. Knowing he now had a date to clean up this garage at some point before Doc returned that evening, he murmured that he would "keep it in mind" before Emma brought the phone back to her ear, biting back a laugh.

"Good," Doc said. "I'll see you both tonight. Don't forget now: Twin Pines Mall, 1:15 AM. Emma, I'll be home after 9:00."

"O-"

Suddenly, the many clocks that lined the eastern wall of the garage struck eight o'clock in perfect unison, their many bells, chimes, and _cuckoos_ clashing horrifically and echoing off the cinderblocks behind them. They clapped their hands over their ears and groaned, Marty staring at the shifting eyes of his mother's old black cat clock he had contributed. He didn't even remember what the whole clock-wall thing was about, but after blowing his eardrums out with the amplifier, all that chiming hurt. Plain and simple.

"Are those my clocks I hear?" Doc asked excitedly.

"Yeah!" Marty yelled into the phone, Emma having handed it to him as she took a few steps back. "It's eight o'clock!"

"They're late! My experiment worked!" Doc said happily. "They're all exactly twenty-five minutes slow!"

The two teenagers slowly looked at one another, hoping they had misheard him, but a sickening realization gripped Marty. He suddenly remembered what the wall-clock thing was about now.

"Wait a minute," Marty said. "Wait a minute, Doc! Are you telling me that it's _8:25_?"

"Precisely!"

Emma's mouth dropped open, and she bounded for her room to change and grab her things.

"Really, Dad?!"

"What? What happened?"

Marty half-laughed. "We're late for school!"

He could hear Doc on the other end telling them to hurry as he hung up the phone, probably none-too-happy to learn that Emma was going to be just as late – if not, later – than he was. He dug his book bag out of the mess of papers and placed his guitar on Doc's workbench. By that time, Emma's bedroom door flew open, and she rushed out, tucking some hair behind her ear.

"I blame you," she said, leading him out the door with a light scorn.

"How is it my fault? I set my own alarm clock."

"And yet you're still gonna be late."

"For which I blame _you_."

Despite all of their efforts to avoid him, Strickland and his pad of tardy slips still found them in the hall before they could make it to their first classes. Emma lowered hers to her side as their principle bestowed Marty's fourth, detention-securing slip unto him and laid on a few harsh insults for good measure. Emma nearly slammed the door to her English class; that man shouldn't be allowed to talk to her – or anyone - that way. Just because her father had dated his sister eons ago…

* * *

><p>It was only the start of an unpleasant day.<p>

Her Calculus test left a bad taste in her mouth. The due date on her Baroque Period essay was moved up a whole week so Mrs. Henderson could grade and return them before she went on maternity leave. They were out of iced tea in the cafeteria, she did the wrong study guide for Spanish, and the substitute in Woodshop made them read at their benches instead of working on their projects so that no accidents happened on his watch.

And, of course, the only kid who did show up for tutoring was one of those grounded-until-the-grades-get-better students who didn't know Ne from Na, so she was stuck explaining how to balance stoichiometry equations to the Chemistry-challenged freshman until 4:12. Her face fell as she packed up and bid the librarian a good weekend; Marty's audition was probably over by now.

She tried to salvage her day with some normalcy, but it seemed that no matter the effort she put forth, it was a day destined to unravel into entropy.

She took up her bench in the town square, pulling her feet up and laying her Music History book open on her folded legs. She took out a notebook, hoping to finish skimming the section on fugues before the sun went down when Marty's laughter caught her attention from across the way. She looked up quickly, lowering her pencil until her wrist rested on her knee.

Expecting to see him celebrating with his fellow band mates, Emma bent her brow at the girl taking his books from him, laying a blue sheet of paper on them, and scribbling something down. The girl gave him a coy smile that sent flames surging up Emma's spine. She felt them fan across her face.

Who the heck was she?

The doe-eyed girl nodded to Marty, exchanging a few words and a bright smile with him. Emma's breath caught, seeing him smile like that. Not because he smiled, but because of the way he smiled. At _her_.

She blinked down at her notes and realized how rigid she had become.

With a resigned sigh, the day had gone to hell.

"I can't believe this…" she muttered.

Emma looked back up as Marty's smile followed the girl to the back of the square where she rejoined her friends. They disappeared behind the clock tower, and Emma tried to quell the rush of emotions that had suddenly sought to drown her. Her smoldering gaze drifted back to where Marty had been, eyes widening to find that he was already on his way over to her with that huge grin. She tried to swallow the golf ball lodged in her throat.

"I will never understand how you are comfortable doing homework on a park bench."

He picked up her book bag and pushed it under the bench before sitting down beside her. Emma casually busied herself with her note-taking again, unable to look at him.

"I see you have groupies now. Did the audition go that well?"

"Well, no," Marty said flatly. His disappointment was chased down with frustration. "First off, everyone was running late. We didn't go on until about ten minutes ago. And when we finally got up there, we didn't play thirty seconds before they cut us off. I'm never going to get anywhere if I can't play in front of a real crowd. _And_ I have detention next week!"

Emma cast his sneakers a sympathetic look. "My day sucked, too."

"But your smile radiated like sunshine when you skipped into History. I'm surprised you weren't showering us with flowers." He received a glare similar to that he had that morning, but they eventually both broke down into a short bout of laughter.

"I guess the day wasn't a total loss," Marty mused after a moment. "Jennifer Parker just gave me her phone number."

Emma looked over, Marty flashing her the soft handwriting in the corner of the "Save the Clock Tower" handout. The petit loops and graceful slant of her phone number and _'Call me!'_ were disgusting. Emma was frequently told to become a doctor as illegible as her writing could be. She went back to copying lines from her textbook, now trying to discretely feminize her script.

"She asked me to think about taking her to the dance since we didn't make the band roster."

Emma paused. "Are you?"

"Yeah. Probably. I'm not going to get to play, so I might as well," he shrugged. "I'm supposed to call her this weekend to let her know."

The flames on her face were becoming an inferno. Still, part of her was adamant on keeping up a convincing indifference in the face of her crumbling composure. She glared over at the blue sheet when Marty wasn't looking. She flipped her notebook over.

"You're getting phone numbers _and_ contributing to the Preservation Society?"

Marty rolled his eyes. "I gave them a quarter. Be glad you're sitting far enough away that they've left you alone."

"I dare someone to shake a coffee can in my face right now."

Marty glanced sideways at the venom in her voice. "Somebody needs their peanut butter."

"Somebody needs to clean up the lab."

"Damn it." He'd forgotten all about that. "Let's go, then."

Marty bent over, pulling her book bag out from under the bench and heaving it up between them. Emma put away her things as he stood, tucking his skateboard under his arm and the offending flyer in his pocket.

"Milkshakes?" he asked when they started up the street.

"You buying?"

"That question only has one answer, right?"

"Uh huh."

"Fine."

* * *

><p>She was happy for him. Honestly, she was. She could only imagine the rut he would have been in if Jennifer Parker hadn't asked him out after his "nightmare" of a failed audition; not that Emma hadn't thought to do the same if he was not otherwise occupied on stage the night of the dance.<p>

She would have mentioned that she would still go if he did, and they'd have a good time between his episodes of jealous sulking as the bands rotated throughout the evening. Something funny or stupid would define the night when they reminisced about it in the future – that dance where someone put bubble soap in the toilets or one of the straps on her dress broke. Maybe he'd ask her to dance, and she'd make some snarky comment to ease the tension before happily being lost in the whirlwind of low lights, balloons, and slow music. And then they'd go to Burger King for milkshakes.

But if he was taking a girl that had made it clear from the get-go that she was interested in him, her hope of something gradually manifesting itself between them on the dance floor would be snuffed out before there was even a chance for it to spark.

Still, she was glad that something had taken his mind off his band's rejection, if only for a short time. She knew that she probably wasn't helping much on that front by having him help her clean up from the amplifier's explosion. Furthermore, Marty probably had enough pent-up frustration that he would have taken a ball bat to the thing if he hadn't blown it out that morning.

Maybe she should have bought _him_ a milkshake.

They had broken down a mass of boxes and pushed the fallen shelf back up, Marty collecting all of the papers, books, and binders for Emma to return to their rightful places. As it grew darker outside, they neared the end of their endeavor. Marty handed her one last book he had scraped up from the cement floor. She sighed at the undying presence that was _Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics_.

"Oh, John von Neumann," she said, turning the dented and tattered hardcover over in her hands. "You are so old."

Marty straightened a stack of blank graphing paper on the edge of the workbench and fastened it with a thick binder clip, tossing the papers onto a low shelf with a heavy thud. He looked over her shoulder as she leafed through the careworn pages.

"Whoa."

Colorful variants of handwriting were crammed into virtually every white space. Portions of text were highlighted, circled, or blacked out, and the upper corners of the last fifty pages or so were wrinkled from water damage. The cardboard was showing on the rounded nubs of the book's once-sharp corners, too. All in all, it was miracle the binding was still holding up.

"What does he use this thing for again?" Marty asked. He'd never seen a book so used.

Emma snapped it shut, sliding it between two other books on the shelf similar in height.

"Everything. That book has looked like that since I can remember," she said, sitting on the arm of the armchair in front of the shelf. "We used it for the final physics project on radiation theory our sophomore year, remember?"

Marty made a face, took his milkshake from the workbench, and loudly slurped the last of it from the bottom of the cup.

"No."

Emma smiled.

He pitched the empty cup into the trash and looked back over at the shelf, satisfied with their hour and half's worth of work. If anything, the lab looked better than it did before Doc disappeared the week before, but with his mentor's mental state in a constant flurry, Marty wouldn't expect him to notice.

Now, the amp – he might notice the amp.

Marty tossed his head towards his handiwork. "Do you know where the curtain for that thing is?"

"I'm sure it's nearby," Emma chuckled. "Hopefully this breakthrough of his will buy you some time before he sees what you did to it. Besides," – she stood up from the arm of the chair, heading for the refrigerator – "I don't think he was actually going to use it for anything apart from letting you practice with it."

Marty picked up his skateboard from next to the door. "Speaking of this 'breakthrough,' you wouldn't happen to know anything about it, would you?"

Emma shrugged, sticking a spoon upright into a jar of peanut butter and putting a glass of iced tea in the crook of her elbow. "I've barely seen him at all this week. He's been gone a lot since he took the padlock off the storage room. I don't know what he's working on right now."

"Now where I have heard that before?"

"What?"

Marty smiled. "Just like you didn't know about the amplifier?"

Okay, so she would admit to telling her dad how excited Marty had been about the band tryouts and how that might have influenced him to build the stupid thing, but she wasn't going to admit it out loud, and certainly not to Marty.

Not that she needed to. He knew it. She knew he knew it. And he kept on about the fact, more interested to get out of her why she had even brought it up to her dad in the first place. Never mind he had been their closest friend for years now. His name was regularly going to come up in their conversations around the dinner table.

But it was still fun to give her a hard time about it.

"I didn't know about the amplifier," she repeated for the umpteenth time that month. "I may have mentioned the auditions, but he took it from there." She ate a small swipe of peanut butter from the end of her finger. "He doesn't let me behind the big curtains as much as you think he does."

"I'll see you later, Em," he laughed, watching her head for the next room. "And stop eating so much damn peanut butter."

Emma stopped, turned around, and pulled the spoon out of the jar, pointing it at his grin threatening.

"Leave me and my peanut butter alone," she warned. "We're going to go bond over _Andy Griffith_, and you're not invited."

"Sor-ry," he said, holding his hands up as he dropped his skateboard to the pavement. "I'll leave you to your peanut butter and reruns."

"Thank you."

His smirk was contagious.

"See ya, Em."

"Bye."

The door closed. Emma's face immediately erupted into a full-blown ear-to-ear smile as she headed for the couch, popping a creamy spoonful of Peter Pan into her mouth.

_Eat your heart out, Jennifer Parker._

**. Please Review .**


	2. Zero Hour

**CHAPTER ONE  
><strong>_**Zero Hour**_

Friday, October 25, 1985  
>11:52 PM<p>

Emmett Brown pulled the large, white storage van into the alley behind his garage. He glanced down at the clock on the radio, having hoped to be back a lot sooner than this. He was cutting it close; by the time he'd gathered everything up, he would barely have enough time to prepare it and review the experiment before Marty was to meet him. Granted, it was the middle of the night, and a few minutes' time might not make much of a difference in the long run, but tonight was all about time.

Tonight, time and its parameters, its properties and possibilities were all going to be redefined if this experiment worked. Those few who already commended his work in the scientific community would herald him amongst the greatest minds in history. And those who respected him as much as the shit on their shoes would suddenly have big smiles plastered on their faces, professing that they had "believed in him all along" or apologizing profusely just to be in the good graces of the man who made time travel possible.

If all went accordingly, that is.

"Damn."

Einstein barked from the passenger side of the cab's bench, pawing at Emmett's wrist as he shut off the ignition.

"All right, all right," Doc said, sliding out of the cab so that his dog could get out. "I hope she remembered to put some food out for you. Stay close and keep quiet, now."

Einstein scampered off around the corner of the garage and out of sight. Doc looked up then, scanning the streaked windows to find the dramatic light show of the television flickering within the sitting room. He pressed his lips together and hurried inside, so sure of what he'd find – Emma balled up on the couch asleep with the TV on, an empty jar of peanut butter lying next to her.

He doubled back to the small kitchen area curiously, and again his suspicions were affirmed. He sighed, smiling to himself when he saw two cases of her favorite food stacked next to the refrigerator on the floor, most of the first case gone. He looked back towards the sitting room at the sound of her voice.

"Einie! Hey, boy! Oh, I missed you, too!"

The dog barked enthusiastically. Doc left the kitchen, walking across the sitting room again to the couch as Emma scratched Einstein behind the ears vigorously. She gave him a sleepy smile.

"Hey, Dad. Next time you barely live here, leave Einstein," she yawned, the dog lying on his back across her feet. She bent over and rubbed his belly, cooing at him. "I missed my puppy dog. Yes, I missed you!"

"Next time I leave you grocery money, I hope you use it for something other than twenty-four jars of peanut butter," he said, still amused behind his stern look.

Einstein rolled off Emma's feet and allowed her to stand. She reached up on her tiptoes to kiss her father's cheek.

"I did," she said, being pulled in for a hug. "I got bread to make sandwiches."

He didn't look too amused at _that_, but she smiled up at him nonetheless.

"So," she said, her voice sing-song, "what's this big breakthrough all about?"

"All in good time," Doc replied, quickly getting back on track. He pulled a piece of paper out of the front pocket on his white jumpsuit and handed it to her. She unfolded it, dutifully reading it over as he gave her further instructions on their way out of the living room.

"I need everything on this list put in the truck immediately. Put everything in the cab. I don't want the back compartment opened until we get to the mall. You get what's on there, and I'll handle the radiation suits and plutonium."

He darted away. Emma stopped mid-step on her way through the lab. "Did you just sa–"

Narrowing her eyes, she stared after her father, confused as he bent down in front of his bed and dragged a big metal case out from underneath it. Her first few questions were answered; she swallowed hard at the biohazard sticker, eyes widening instantly as she read 'PLUTONIUM' below it.

She huffed incredulously.

"How long has that been there?!"

"Shh! I brought it in Tuesday night after you had gone to sleep," he said, hastening out the door with it. "Don't worry; it's been in this special lead-lined case, so there was never any risk for exposure."

"Oh, well, that makes it fine, then!"

Emma followed him outside to the van. "Where did you get _plutonium_? What are you working on that you _need_ plutonium?"

Doc pushed the case under the driver's seat of the cab, rounding her with an austere, anxious frown.

"Go get the things from the lab," he hissed.

Emma deepened her brow, stepping in front of him. "Dad, what's going on? Are you okay?"

When he turned to her with a knowing grin, she straightened uneasily. As bizarre as she was accustomed to him being, this was one of those moments where he looked borderline manic. It wasn't just because of the intensity of the excitement in his wild eyes, but it was that knowing aura behind the excitement and in the curve of his wide grin. Any lesser person would have backed away.

"This is it, Emma," he said. "This is the one."

* * *

><p>Preoccupied by her father's insistence on being infuriatingly ambiguous and vague, Emma had absentmindedly collected the items on the list he'd given her, save for the video camera. This discovery led to her digging change out of the ashtray of the van and crossing the parking lot to the payphones, yawning through several rings until Marty answered.<p>

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's Em. Are you still coming down here?"

"Yeah," he drawled. "I'll be out of here in two minutes."

"We need you to stop by our place for the video camera. I forgot to grab it."

"Sure. Did you find out what he's been working on?"

Emma looked back across the parking lot as Doc climbed into the back of the van through the cab. A glow of bluish light came from the windows. She hugged herself with her free arm.

"No. And I'm half-afraid to find out."

Marty chuckled in the background. She shook her head.

"You don't understand," she said quickly. "He's freaking _me_ out. He has a case full of plutonium."

"What? Where would he even get plutonium?"

"I watched him shove it under the seat in the cab, Marty. He's brought the radiation suits and everything."

"I'm sure it's fine, Em. I'll stop for the video camera and be there soon, okay?"

"All right," she conceded. "Bye."

* * *

><p>Emma had taken to sitting on the ground next to Einstein after her father had instructed her to place a stopwatch around his neck. She watched the truck shake slightly as he ran around inside it, insisting that if she came in, she not enter the storage compartment. Finally, when Einstein ran off to a nearby tree, she got up, pretending that dusting off her white pants would magically rid them of her decision to sit on damp asphalt. She walked to the driver's side door, yelling in at him.<p>

"Aren't you at least going to _tell_ me what it is?"

Doc poked his head through the small door between the seats of the cab and looked at her. His daughter was his partner in nearly every experiment, even if it was only to tighten a bolt. She wasn't used to being so excluded from his projects, and revisiting the last several weeks, Emmett realized he hadn't said two words to her about anything he was working on – time machine, amplifier, or otherwise. It wasn't fair to hold her in such suspense, and the contempt on her face said as much.

Doc stepped into the back of the van, letting the door swing open as he disappeared with a beckoning smile.

Emma quickly grabbed the steering wheel and seat, clambering into the cab after him. She touched the tiny, hollow door as she inched into the dark compartment, immediately walking right into a thinning vapor and hard, metal protrusion. She yelped, pain shooting up the front of her shin.

"Ow!"

"Careful, careful!" Doc said off to her right somewhere. "Here."

Overhead, two rows of dim fluorescent lights crackled to life on either side of the ceiling. Emma looked down at what she had walked into – a car bumper. Still shaking the grimace from her face, her eyes wandered up, instantly captivated by the heavily modified automobile before her.

"Whoa." Emma slid along the tight space between the passenger side of the vehicle and the wall of the van, tentatively letting her fingertips graze the cool steel of its body. "What did you do to it?"

"Do you remember taking it upon yourself to alphabetize all of my blueprints when you were six? You came across something called the 'flux capacitor?'"

Emma smiled; she did. It was a strange, equilateral "Y" that vaguely reminded her of a biohazard symbol like the one on the back of her father's radiation suit, harkening back to the fact that plutonium was involved in this experiment. Closely examining the large rectangular thrusters on the back of the car, she nodded.

"Yeah, but this is a DeLorean," she half-laughed. "It doesn't look anything like what was on that blueprint. Unless you added a thing or two."

Doc beamed from the other side of the car. "It's inside."

Emma looked up, coming around to his side of the car as hydraulics raised the door over their heads. Emmett urged her inside, and she ducked in, trying to take in all of the gadgetry.

"Is this thing still a car?"

"Look behind you. Between the seats."

There it was – the flux capacitor in all its glory. Its three slender, fiber-optic cables had currents of light energy coursing through them towards its apex, the mild fizzle and zap of electricity humming spiritedly from within the case. Eleven years after seeing it for the first time on paper, it was now a tangible entity thriving with possibility. She looked back at her dad, who had leaned in beside her to admire his creation.

"Well, it's great," she said, "but what does it do?"

"Oh ho," Emmett laughed. "You just climb over there while I back it out, and I'll _show_ you."

Emma carefully crawled over into the passenger seat, crouching in it as she absorbed the overhaul he had done to the interior of the car. When Emmett got in, the door hissed to a close, and he turned the key in the ignition, starting the engine. Everything glowed – buttons, knobs, gauges, things she wasn't even certain _should_ glow. Letting her feet slip to the floor, Emma leaned forward to inspect the readouts on a silver console mounted just below the tape deck.

"What's this? Is it part of the flux capacitor?"

"It's powered by the flux capacitor," Doc said, hitting a button on the visor above his head. The back of the van began to open.

Emma squinted at the black label under the red display.

"'Destination time?'"

The car jerked into gear, and Emma's face nearly hit the console as her father began to back the DeLorean out into the parking lot.

"I'll explain in a moment!"

Emma slowly sat back in her seat, marveling at everything around her with as much apprehension as intrigue. What did the flux capacitor even _do_?

Moments later, she was pulled from her reveries when Doc greeted Marty. Emma let the hatch door soar over her head and popped up over the roof of the car to see him. Marty turned the camera on her, zooming in.

"Fun new toy?"

She shrugged. "I'm still not sure what it does."

"If you'd roll tape over _here_," Doc said from next to the driver's door, "we could get to that a lot sooner than later. Emma, next to Marty. Thank you."

Emma raised her eyebrows, Marty smirking as she joined him. She folded her arms over her chest and looked back up at her father, giving him her undivided attention. Marty turned forward as well and pulled the lens back, settling Emmett in the middle of the frame as the scientist straightened himself professionally.

"Okay, Doc. It's all you."

"Good evening. I'm Dr. Emmett Brown. I'm standing on the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. It's Saturday morning, October 26, 1985, 1:18 AM, and this is Temporal Experiment #1."

Doc then turned to his ever-faithful Einstein, corralling him into the driver's seat of the car. Emma followed Marty closer to the DeLorean, and she was briefly entertained by the thought of Einstein driving the car telepathically.

Doc moved off to the side after buckling in Einstein, holding up the dog's stopwatch next to an identical one around his own neck.

"Please note that Einstein's clock is in precise synchronization with my control watch. Got it?"

"Check, Doc."

"Good."

Emma fixated on the small, boxlike item Doc pulled out from behind the dog as he shut the hatch, stepped back, and extended a four-foot antenna from it. Her eyes lit up. She latched on to Emmett's right arm, itching to get her hands on it.

"What a remote!"

"You got that thing hooked up to the…car?"

Emma smiled up at the DeLorean in astonishment when its motor awoke at the push of a button. It was all she could do to keep herself from jumping up and down.

"Can I do it?"

"Not now, not now," Doc said, taking his arm back from his daughter. "Just watch."

The back tires spun wildly, and the three of them watched as the DeLorean swerved away in reverse before driving off into the distant lot. Emma couldn't take her eyes off it; she had tinkered in engineering, but in no way had she come close to remote-controlling an actual car. Her father ordered Marty to redirect the camera to the DeLorean as it skidded to a halt, backed up another twenty or thirty feet, and stopped. Its engine gave a low, beastly growl.

Doc slipped behind them, grabbing Marty's elbow and pulling him along after him. Emma followed without coercion, waiting on bated breath with eyes as wide as her father's as they stood directly in front of the far-off vehicle, Marty between them with the camcorder.

"If my calculations are correct," – his smile turned smug – "when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit."

Emmett flicked a tiny red switch, slowly moving his other thumb under the right-center lever. He pushed it upwards gently, and a football field away, the DeLorean's wheels screeched, thick, white smoke billowing from the friction generated by the back tires remaining in place. Marty bumped into Emma as he nervously scooted away from her father, so she quickly traded places with him, running over to his other side. She craned her neck between the beeping remote control and the climbing pitch of the DeLorean's stationary acceleration.

Finally, when the counter on top of the remote reached sixty-five, Emmett snapped the red switch down, and the car came screaming towards them ferociously. Entranced, Emma's mouth opened as she involuntary took a small step forward, allowing her father to reach behind her and catch Marty when he went to bolt away from the oncoming car.

Emma let out a shaky breath and narrowed her eyes as the DeLorean barreled toward them. Suddenly, brilliant blue sparks of incredible light exploded along the synapses of the vehicle, leaping into and cracking through the cold air surrounding it. Courage waning, she dropped her face into Emmett's arm when the blinding, blue-white radiance became too much. A deafening _whoosh_ crashed over them like a tidal wave, but a car never collided with her. She looked up as Doc spun around with Marty, a pair of fire trails in the wake of the missing car.

She cursed herself for looking away when she did, chest heaving as she followed the flames between her father and Marty's feet. Emmett began to laugh in disbelief, shouting and jumping next to her with the remote control over his head triumphantly.

"What did I tell you?! Eighty-eight miles per hour!"

Emma was speechless. She should be dead right now.

"The temporal displacement occurred exactly 1:20 AM and zero seconds!"

Marty looked to be a stunned as she was, perhaps even more so. She staggered up next to him as he dropped the scalding license plate back to the pavement, both of them still searching for a car that wasn't there. She swallowed.

What _did_ the flux capacitor even do?

"Jesus Christ, Doc. You disintegrated Einstein!"

Emma wheeled around at her father. "What? _What_ did you do?!"

"Calm down! I didn't disintegrate anything!" Emmett said, digging a notepad from his front pocket as he hurried over to them. "The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact!"

"Then where the hell are they?!"

"The appropriate question is, '_when_ the hell are they?' You see, Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler. I sent him into the future!"

Emma stared at her dad levelly, no longer attempting to logically grasp the situation as he ran to the opposite end of the diminishing fire trails. "I'm sorry, what?"

"I sent him one minute into the future!" Doc said, running back to her as Marty wandered away. "And at precisely 1:21 AM and zero seconds, we should catch up with him and the time machine!"

Her face fell. _Andy Griffith _and peanut butter had left her with some doozies before, but this?

"Okay." Emma put her hand over his furious scribbling, making his insane expression meet her hard one. "What _the hell_ are you talking about? The _future_? Are you sure you didn't just make them invisible?"

For some reason, she was ready to accept that as a more plausible circumstance than time travel.

"Yes! And it worked! My time machine worked!"

"Wait a minute, Doc," Marty said, rejoining them. "Are you telling me that you built a _time machine_…out of a DeLorean?"

"The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

"Style?" Emma asked incredulously. "_That's _why you used a DeLorean?"

"Not _just_ why. It has a practical aspect," Doc defended. "The stainless steel construction made the flux dispersal –"

Emma squinted at his beeping wristwatch when he did, and he took her by the waist, hurrying her off to the side by her tiptoes as he pushed Marty backward. Before she was out of his grasp, a series of cracks broke over them, and she turned, watching the DeLorean materialize right where they had been standing not seconds before, continuing on its trajectory from exactly one minute ago. She was still working through a particularly gripping stupor when Einstein appeared in the driver's seat unharmed, happily wagging his tail.

"Einstein's clock is exactly one minute behind mine and still ticking!"

The dog jumped from the DeLorean, barking all the way back to the van.

Emma turned back to her dad, her eyes wider than she had ever known them to be.

Forget _Andy Griffith _and peanut butter. His "serious shit" theory was right on target.

"He's fine, and he's completely unaware that anything happened! As far as he's concerned, the trip was instantaneous! That's why Einstein's watch is exactly one minute behind mine," Emmett explained, brimming with elation. "He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time!"

Although Marty was still taking everything in, Emma finally began to smile, violently knocked sideways by the realization of the importance of what had just happened and what it meant for her father. For science.

"Oh my god!" she laughed suddenly, causing Marty to start. She leapt at her father, bouncing with uncontrollable excitement. "You just made a dog travel through time!"

"Yes!" Doc said, matching her manic, open-mouthed grin as he gripped her shoulders. "Now you understand! I did it! Time travel _is_ possible!"

Emma was certain she was going to spontaneously combust from the overwhelming exhilaration. "This is huge!" she gushed, firing off questions in rapid succession. "How did you do it? How does it work? Is it the flux capacitor? Is that -?"

"Here! Come over here," Emmett said, pulling Marty and the video camera in tow. "I'll explain everything!"

**. Please Review .**


	3. The Clock That Went Backward

**CHAPTER TWO  
><strong>_**The Clock That Went Backward**_

Saturday, October 26, 1985  
>1:22 AM<p>

Emma jogged around to the passenger side of the DeLorean, bursting at the seams with eagerness to hear how she had just witnessed her dog travel through time. She lifted the door and dived into the seat next to her dad as Marty kneeled outside the driver's door, pointing the video camera at the dashboard.

"First," Emmett said, "you turn the time circuits on."

He pushed a lever down between the seats, and a green light came on under his wrist. Then, the red, green, and yellow displays on the big silver console lit up. The softly illuminated gauges gave a rich, warm sigh.

"This readout tells you where you're going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were," Emmett continued, pointing to each in turn. "You input your destination time on this keypad. Say you wanna the signing of the Declaration of Independence."

He punched in a series of numbers to the tune of a telephone keypad, hitting a button off to the side of it. A tiny white light above his finger came on, and the red line of the console displayed _JUL 04 1776._

"Or witness the birth of Christ!" _DEC 25 0000._

"Here's a red letter date in the history of science: November 5, 1955."

Emma and Marty looked up at him as he trailed off, repeating the date and laughing to himself. Marty leaned out from behind the camera, tilting his head at her in question, but she just shrugged, making a face in Doc's direction.

"What?" Marty asked him, lowering the camera. "I don't get it. What happened?"

"That was the day I invented time travel."

Emma shifted in her seat. Obviously those blueprints from eleven years ago were considerably older than she thought.

"I remember it vividly," Emmett said. "I was standing on the edge of my toilet, hanging a clock. The porcelain was wet. I slipped, hit my head off the edge of the sink, and when I came to, I had a revelation, a vision; a picture in my head! A picture of this," he said, turning and pointing at the flux capacitor. "_This_," – he smiled back at Emma, finally answering her question – "is what makes time travel possible – the flux capacitor."

"Why have I never heard any of this?" she asked. "Not even the story about you hitting your head? That's a good one."

"Em, doesn't he hit his head often enough that you don't need stories to get you through to the next incident?" Marty smiled. She bit her lip when her father looked over at her.

"He's got a point," Doc said, widening their grins. "Besides, there was a lot at stake with this one, and it needed kept close to the chest. But you've both helped with it through the years; you just never knew it. Marty, you made this case the flux capacitor is in," he said, tapping on the glass front of the metal fuse box, "and Emma drew up the early wiring schematics I'd later use for connecting the circuit grid."

Pride visibly swelled in Emma's chest. All her life, she had watched her father work painstakingly after success, vowing at the tender age of three to be "just like her daddy" and "be good at science" so that she could help him one day make his mark. Had she known that years of seemingly disjointed projects and research at her father's request were the basis for the success of this experiment, she might have paid a little more respect to quantum physics. But that was neither here nor there.

"It took almost thirty years and the entire family fortune to realize the vision of that day."

"You were working on this thing thirteen years before I was born?"

Emmett huffed, staring through the steering wheel at a distant memory. "My god," he whispered, looking over at Emma fondly. "Has it really been that long?"

Pink blossomed in her cheeks. "'Fraid so, old timer."

"Well, things have certainly changed around here," Doc said. He left the car, going off on a tangent about Peabody and his "crazy idea" of breeding pine trees.

Emma shook her head after him. "Said the pot to the kettle…"

Marty sniggered, hoisting the camera back up on his shoulder as he panned the interior of the car. Emma rolled out of the shot and the seat. She took a few steps away from the DeLorean, staring at it with a hand over her mouth. This was inexplicably unfathomable. Words truly did no justice. Every emotion known to man was exploding within her simultaneously, and she began to laugh again, shaking her head at the DeLorean. She walked backwards towards Marty, unable to take her eyes off the car for fear it would evaporate from existence.

"Does it run, like, on ordinary unleaded gasoline?"

"Unfortunately, no," she heard her father reply in the distance. "It requires something with a little more kick – plutonium!"

Emma found herself nodding at this simple, everyday explanation as she intently watched the water from the melting ice roll off the hood. Marty didn't seem to be so understanding; his voice rose.

"Are you telling me that this sucker is _nuclear_?!"

Emma turned around as Doc hurried over to them, Marty quickly sticking the camera back up in his face.

"No, no, no, no! This sucker's electrical," he explained adamantly, "but I needed a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that I need."

Emma smiled over her shoulder at the time machine. "Oooh…" So _that's_ why he needed plutonium. "Cool."

Marty rounded her. "Cool?! Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium! Did – did you rip that off?"

To his horror, Doc turned on heel, waving his arms frantically for him to lower his voice. Marty felt his knees quiver as the scientist professed quickly to the camera that yes, of _course_ he had, and he did so by giving bomb-happy Libyans a casing that housed a collection of nothing but junk pinball machine parts.

_Pinball machine parts._

"Let's get you radiation suits! We must prepare to reload!"

Marty huffed in disbelief as Emma meandered up next to him, her eyes not nearly as wide as his.

"Well, I guess we know what the plutonium's for," she said, doing a terrible job of hiding her smile. Marty stared at her.

"Whoa, hang on!" He grabbed her wrist when she went to dart for the truck and pulled her into his side, whispering fretfully at her as they watched Doc rummage for his radiation helmet. "Your dad just told us that he ripped off plutonium that was going to be used in a bomb! Doesn't that seem a bit serious to you?"

"Well, there's no bomb…"

"Emma!"

"I know, I know!" she groaned, shutting her eyes momentarily. "I promise I'll yell at him later. Right now I want to know how he factored in the distance displacement of the Earth's rotation! Come on!"

Now Emma had him by the wrist, dragging him off as if to her favorite roller coaster. She was stuck in Super Excited Scientist mode like her dad, and there would be no hope in reeling her in now. He knew that Everyday Emma wasn't okay with this plutonium business, but as she had chosen to point out in her current state, at least there wasn't a bomb blowing something up somewhere. Instead, its destructive power was being used towards furthering man's understanding of its universe via time machine.

Was that even a real sentence?

A radiation suit was thrown in his face. Emma was already stepping into hers next to the truck and pulling it on skillfully.

"Maybe there are some kind of distance-computation circuits hardwired into the flux capacitor," he heard her murmuring. "Or under the time circuit console. But—no, it'd have to be connected to the flux capacitor somehow, if that's what makes it all possible…"

Marty sat down the camcorder, wriggling into his suit. "What are you going on about?"

"Think about it," she said, zipping her suit up and tying her hair back. "In that one minute of time Einstein skipped over, the Earth had moved over a thousand miles through space. He should be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or getting sucked into a vacuum in outer space."

"What?"

"Dad! How did you account for the speed of the Earth's rotation and the angle of the axis tilt through orbit?" she shouted, situating her helmet between her shoulder blades.

"It has a lot to do with the Law of Cosines, gravitational pull, and the energy required to keep it in the atmosphere, but most of that has to do with the flux capacitor."

Emma nudged Marty with a knowing grin. "Told you."

"Helmets on!" Doc said, opening the case of plutonium. "We don't want to risk exposure!"

Emma smacked Marty's hood up over his head as she passed. "Helmets on, Marty."

He winced in surprise and steadied himself, looking through the plastic mask to see Doc and Emma staring at him expectantly in their strange headgear from over the plutonium. Marty picked up the video camera and dashed over to them, fixing it over his eye the best he could. He gave a thumbs up, and Doc slowly reached down, lifting a cylinder out of the case. Doc held up the clear cylinder, examining a menacing, bright red tube within it as he carried it to the back of the DeLorean.

Emma tried not to crowd her father; with as much energy as their adrenaline was radiating, having both of them in such close proximity of the plutonium at the same time _would_ be enough to cause a nuclear reaction. Instead, she hunkered down next to Marty and the video camera as Emmett slowly turned the cylinder. As the cherry-red pod scraped and plummeted into the mouth of the plutonium chamber, Marty nearly sent the camcorder flying over his shoulder. Emma straightened from her hunch and looked over at him, narrowing her eyes.

Emmett capped the shaft, removing his helmet. "It's safe now. Everything's lead-lined."

He carried the empty shell back to the case and opened it with his foot. Emma threw her helmet back eagerly, oblivious to hitting Marty with it. Again, he juggled the camera, sending the back of Emma's head a glare.

"Don't lose those tapes now," Doc said, putting his helmet on top of the plutonium case. "We'll need a record. Oh! I almost forgot my luggage."

Emma stared at him. "Luggage?"

"Who knows if they've got cotton underwear in the future!"

"Can I come?" she begged, her hands balling into fists in front of her. She shook them vigorously, trying to quell the urge to bounce up and down again. "Pleeeease, can I come? Please? It's the weekend. I _don't_ have school tomorrow."

"Emma, I can set these time circuits to bring me back the moment after I leave," Emmett said, watching his daughter's shoulders fall as she fixed him under a scornful pout. He sighed. "Perhaps I'll take you in the morning. This isn't the only time I'm going to be using the thing, you know. I'll go ahead now, check things out, see what's happening twenty-five years down the line –"

"Twenty-five years?"

"_Then_, under my supervision, I may allow you and Marty each a turn to come with me."

Emma smiled impishly. "Can I drive when it's my turn?"

Emmett's eyebrows deepened. What a loaded question.

Without breaking eye contact with Emma, he motioned for Marty to roll tape. His daughter shifted her weight to her other hip, settling next to Marty with a proud, gentle smile on him. The door's hydraulics hissed the hatch aloft. Emmett cleared his throat; it was suddenly thick with the indescribable happiness of achieving the impossible against all odds.

He did it. He invented time travel.

Well, maybe not "invented" time travel. He invented what made time travel _possible_.

With a nod, he rested his forearm on the driver's side hatch, trying to expel the nerves from his voice through a breathy exhale when he looked into the camera.

"I, Dr. Emmett Brown, am about to embark on a historic journey."

Wait.

Wait…

He started to laugh. "What am I thinking of? I almost forgot to bring some extra plutonium! How did I ever expect to get back?" he rambled. "One pellet, one trip? I must be out of my mind!"

Emma was about to tell him to hurry up and get one - the sooner he was gone, the sooner he would get back so she could go – when Einstein, sitting up in the window of the truck's cab, barked loudly.

"What is it, Einie?"

The dog looked forward without another sound. Emma looked from Einstein to her father in bewilderment. He looked past her and Marty, and an uneasiness prickled up her spine and over her scalp as his face became grave. He walked up to them unblinkingly, sliding the smooth rubber of his gloved hand along the edge of the stainless steel hatch. It dropped to his side slowly before he stopped.

"Oh my god, they found me. I don't know how, but they found me."

Emma shook her head in confusion. "I- What?"

"Run for it!"

"Who? _Who_?"

"Who do you think?! The Libyans!"

Super Excited Scientist Emma stripped a gear, swallowing hard. Doc's outburst sent her into a dreadful, vicious nose-dive as Everyday Emma recollected in an instant all that he'd said before about the plutonium, the Libyans, the bomb, _the pinball machine parts._

"Oooooh noooo."

She spun around next to Marty, winded at the sight of a man appearing out of the top of a Volkswagon with a machine rifle.

"Holy shit!"

The blue bus gunned towards them, bullets raining around them. She and Marty each grabbed the other immediately, and they stumbled back against the DeLorean together, Emma's radiation helmet knocked over her head sideways. Hearing her father's muffled shouts, she ripped it off, seeing him beat a large pistol with his hand in frustration.

"Dad, over here!"

Another round of fire sent him in the opposite direction for cover – right to the Libyans.

The bus screeched to a stop, and Emmett, trembling, stood straight in the accusing headlights with his hands raised. Meeting the eyes of the man he had personally wronged in their dealings, his heart sank as the gun cocked. Behind him, Emma fought Marty to let go of the back of her radiation suit. Emmett threw his gun in a last-ditch effort to save his life, if only to be granted the mercy of being allowed to turn around and look at his daughter one last time.

Libyan Nationalists, however, tend not to be so merciful.

The man atop the Volkswagon gave a barbaric sneer, baring his gnashed teeth as his finger crashed down on the trigger unforgivingly. Emma's squirming stopped as she and Marty froze in wide-eyed horror. Emmett's body was thrown backwards, his wounded cries silenced when he landed in an unceremonious heap on the asphalt.

Emma suddenly scrambled forward on all fours, Marty having released his hold on her when he jumped up, screaming.

"Nooooo! Bastard!"

Before Emma could even get to her feet properly, the rifle had her and Marty in its sights.

Marty lunged for her wrist, dragging her to the front of the truck for cover as they unleashed another series of seemingly unending shots. He threw himself against the grill as the bullets bounced off the side of the truck with small, bright explosions.

"This way!"

He darted to the other side of the truck, ready to make a break across the parking lot when the Libyans flew around the corner, the headlights washing over him with finality. In the moment that he shut his eyes and choked back a whimper, he realized that Emma wasn't there for him to shield and bury his face into when the bullets ripped through him.

_Click_. _Snap._ Angry shaking.

Marty inched his eyes open in disbelief.

"Go, Marty! Run!"

Blood pulsing in his ears, Marty made a break back towards the DeLorean, pulling Emma to her feet as he blew passed the front of the van. Emma cried out as he shoved her into the DeLorean.

"What? Wh—oh, shit."

A bloody sheen glossed the fender she had been leaning against. Emma righted herself in the passenger seat, choking out painful sobs as the left shoulder of her white radiation suit grew a dark, shining circle. Another level of fear now added to his nightmare, Marty dropped into the driver's seat, hatch in hand. He looked back to call to Doc, to tell him they were coming and to hold on, but the work boots and radiation suit did not move in a weak plea for help; they remained lifeless on the cold ground, not yet marred by the red pool Marty knew must come in the aftermath of such mutilation.

"Marty."

The Libyans' bus finally lurched forward, and Marty slammed the door shut, turned the key, and hit the gas. Emma gasped as she back flew into the seat. The back of her upper arm seared, and she succumbed to tearful moans. The DeLorean ran over the edge of a divider, and she screamed as the painful jolt shot agony up her neck, through her back, and down her arm. She tried to brace herself against the seat with a stiff right arm as the car weaved furiously, bullets snapping off its body relentlessly.

"Marty!"

"Holy shit!"

"What?"

"They have a goddamned RPG!"

Emma gritted her teeth as she was thrown into the negative G-forces of a violent turn, the DeLorean banking sharply around the curve. Successfully managing not to roll the car, Marty's body slammed into the door, and he straightened the wheel.

"Let's see if these bastards can do ninety."

In a world where she wasn't preoccupied with debilitating pain, Emma would hysterically reprimand him for insulting terrorists that had a bazooka pointed at them, but Marty punched the pedal again, sending them speeding down a straightaway, back towards the van. Emma lolled her head upright with the little strength her neck had to support it, and she stayed her short pants at the distinct zaps and pops electrifying the outside of the car.

Her eyes caught the digital speedometer as it flicked over to _87_.

"Marty, no!"

'Light' was too small, too ordinary a word. An astonishing, ethereal brightness blanked out everything around them. Marty winced, and in an instant, the world reappeared, and he was tearing through a field with a scarecrow bombarding the windshield, sliding off in time to reveal an old wooden barn. He hit the brakes desperately, but the wheels slipped against the grass, his radiation helmet fell over his face, and the DeLorean went barreling into the barn.

* * *

><p>The crash may have been cushioned by a wall of hay bales, but it still threw Marty's chest into the steering wheel with considerable force, knocking the wind out of him. Overhead, part of the barn's roof collapsed, and he sat up slowly, nursing a sore neck. The world had finally stopped moving after all the running, swerving, and speeding, and a painful bout of dizziness finally caught up to him. He lowered his head back down to the steering wheel.<p>

"Holy shit," he groaned inside his helmet. He turned his head towards the passenger seat, his breath fogging up the tiny plastic window.

"Em?" He reached out and weakly prodded her once. "Emma? Are you okay?"

She was motionless, her head planted firmly into the dashboard. The inky spot on her shoulder had grown, likely larger beneath the radiation suit. A generous swath of it was smeared on the back of her seat. He sat up and pushed his helmet back, terror-stricken.

"Not you, too, Em," he said, face twisting fearfully. "Come on."

He pulled her back against the seat, pushing two fingers into the side of her throat. Thankfully, a delicate, steady throb was there; she was only passed out from hitting her head. Relief rushed from his lungs, only to instill him with the realization that he was going to lose her if she continued bleeding much longer.

"I'll be right back."

Opening the door, Marty carefully stepped out into the middle of the carnage he had created, his helmet falling over his face. Before he had even taken a step, several screams ricocheted around him, and he fell over, knocking the radiation helmet back from his face. He slowly looked back at a couple of indifferent cows.

"What the hell?"

Marty hurried to his feet, going outside in an attempt to appease the people that had run off.

"Hello?"

Maybe they could tell him where he was, patch Emma up, and get them on their way again.

"Uh, excuse me."

They owned a barn. Homey, friendly farm types were humble and hospitable, if anything. They appreciated the importance of life's simplicities, a good day's hard work, and warm, homemade bread. "_Green Acres_ style," he could Emma say with her lifelong love of old sitcoms.

All he had to do was smooth things over with an apology, promise to come help fix it after school for a few days – no hard feelings.

"Sorry about your barn —"

A deafening gunshot blew a hole in the door next to Marty.

_Green Acres, my ass._

He tripped backwards through the door into the hay, scrambling to shut the door and get in the DeLorean as more bullets blasted through the thin, faded wood of the barn.

"Hang on," he said to his silent passenger.

He floored it, jutting his arm out across Emma so that she didn't hit the dashboard again. The DeLorean raced for the road, Marty swerving, spinning dirt, and mowing over a small pine tree as more thunderous booms echoes after him, gratefully no further passed their mailbox.

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	4. Sapphire and Steel

**CHAPTER THREE  
><strong>_**Sapphire and Steel**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
>6:27 AM<p>

"Em? Em, you gotta wake up. Come on."

She incurred a few light taps to her cheek and came to, nauseous from pain. Swallowing a particularly vile lurch, her fingers grazed the tender lump above her right eye. The bright, morning sky was as harsh as the metallic scent of blood wafting from her shoulder. She turned her head in the direction of Marty, trying to see him through a squint as she held her breath. It was an effort to speak.

"Didn't you just give me a concussion three weeks ago?"

"Em, we're in trouble."

She rolled her head over to the window, blinking at the skewed landscape of an endless field halved by a dirt road, pristine Lyon Estates markers, and a billboard flanked by colorful pennants whipping in the wind.

"I wish that meant we were getting a speeding ticket instead of what you're about to tell me."

The hood of the car slammed, and Marty ducked back inside, throwing Doc's suitcase on the seat.

"What?"

"Guess how fast you were going."

It took a moment, but his face fell. Seized with panic, Marty looked over at the time circuits sharply, reading the date on the red display before they beeped out. The plutonium alarm went off.

"And," she added, "guess what we didn't bring."

Marty stared at Emma, quickly leaning in to start the car. The engine gave a few dying whirs despite his multiple attempts to resurrect it.

"You have _got_ to be kidding me."

"Lead foot."

"Speaking of lead," – he nodded to her shoulder – "we need to get you to a hospital. After I move this thing out of the road."

Marty put the gear in neutral and turned the wheel before getting out to push the DeLorean in the direction of the billboard. Emma tried to look over her shoulder at the wound, but craning her neck back at such an angle required tensing a torn muscle, so she swung her head forward with a gasp, panting from the intensity of the raw burn.

Next, she clamped down on her lip, feeling her body start to shake as she reached around with her right arm to assess the damage. Taking a deep breath, she hung her head in the crook of her elbow, barely ghosting the surface of the warm, wet spot. She outlined the jagged shape of the bullet's entrance in the radiation suit and let out a few frightened sobs.

She lifted her head from her arm and brought it around to the front of her shoulder, gently flattening her palm against it. No warm, wet spot. No jagged exit hole.

There was a bullet in her. She had actually been shot.

When the car stopped moving, Marty eventually reappeared outside the driver's door, already half out of his radiation suit.

"There's a sign right up the road that says town is two miles from here," he said, balling up the suit and throwing it on the floor. He grabbed the suitcase from the seat, walking around the front of the car and opening her hatch. "Do you think you can walk that far?" he asked, kneeling on the ground and rummaging through Doc's suitcase.

"Yeah," she managed, pushing herself away from the back of the seat. "I was shot in the shoulder, not the leg."

Marty smiled. "Unzip your suit, smart ass."

Emma did so as she looked down at her father's things, too numb to process what she had seen as reality. Time travel and her dad gunned down all in one night? She was trying to breathe in a vacuum, and it was too much. Maybe if she said it to herself enough it would be more real. _My dad was killed. He was shot by terrorists._ Right now, those words only put a knot in her stomach. In time, when it properly sank in and the shock and adrenaline had worn off, the dam would break. She knew that. But right now, it was too fresh and too improbable to seem real.

Still, seeing Marty fold on her dad's long, white sock into a thick square and shake out one of his button-downs made the knot in her stomach tighten uncomfortably.

"You're gonna have to help me get out of this thing," she said breathlessly, swinging her legs out of the car. Holding her left arm as still as possible, she stood with little difficulty. Marty laid the shirt and sock aside and stood up behind her, reaching around for the two halves of the suit at her neck.

"Do you want to do this one arm at a time?"

"I think it's loose enough that it'll slide right off."

Marty pulled back, and Emma's breath hitched as the material peeled away from the injury. She heard Marty make a repulsive noise in the back of his throat. Thankfully, he withheld his comments and eased the cuffs of the sleeves over her wrists. From there, the suit fell around her knees, and Emma stepped out of it.

"There." Marty collected her suit and pitched it into the DeLorean as she sat down on the doorjamb. "Can you turn your shoulder towards me?"

"Uh, yeah. Here."

She slid to one side and turned, giving him access to the wound. Lightheaded, she shut her eyes, grimacing at the sour taste snaking up her throat.

"Hurry up before I pass out."

Marty sat on the doorjamb next to her, moving her ponytail aside to get his first real look at it. His suspicions had been correct; it was far worse under the suit. The tiny navy and teal horizontal stripes of her shirt were indiscernible because of the opaque mass spreading through its threads. The dark, wet shine covered the entire upper part of her left sleeve and traveled over a good portion of her shoulder blade. Finding the blackest spot in her arm just below the socket, he put one hand on her back to steady them both as he pressed the sock over it. Emma whimpered.

"Sorry," he said, guiltily pressing harder. "Can you reach around and hold this?"

"Yeah."

"It might be easier to go under your arm," Marty said, and she redirected her hand. He took her fingers, guiding them up to the sock. "There. Keep that pressure on it."

Emma let her head touch the car as Marty tore the sleeve from the shirt. "I don't think going into a hospital like this is a good idea."

"You're in excruciating pain, bleeding out with a bullet lodged in your shoulder," Marty grunted, tugging at the sleeve aggressively. "Isn't this the kind of thing you go to a hospital _for_?"

"Not in 1955."

"What? People don't get shot in Mayberry?"

"Okay," Emma said as the sleeve ripped fully from the shirt, "how were you going to explain how I got shot?"

Marty faltered at her question, tossing the remainder of Doc's shirt back at the suitcase. 'Shot by Libyans,' 'drive-by,' and 'science experiment gone wrong' didn't exactly sound right to begin with, and now that he _did_ think about it, there _wasn't_ a good reason to go into a 1950s hospital with a gunshot wound unless they were criminals on the run. The medical field wasn't as advanced, they'd try to open some investigation…

"Well, what's your idea then?" he asked, flattening the sleeve and looping it under her arm. "You can't walk around like this."

"Just tie it off for now," she said, stiffening as he tightened a knot over the sock. "We have to make it into town first before we can do anything."

Marty stood up and took his orange vest off, followed by his denim jacket. When Emma was up, he motioned for her to turn around.

"Put this on." He started working the sleeve up her left arm. "It'll cover your shoulder so no one's freaking out when they see you."

After a good bit of patience, effort, and sharp inhales, Emma had Marty's jacket on. He reinstated his orange vest before piling their belongings into the DeLorean and throwing several large branches over it to hide its gleam in the sunlight from passing motorists. Emma waited by the road, hardening her mentality so that she could make the two-mile walk without having to resort to Marty carrying her. When he came around from behind the billboard, he stuck his hands in his pockets, and, side-by-side, they started up the road.

* * *

><p>They wandered into Hill Valley, Marty slowly digesting everything around him. The cars, the clothes, the buildings and signs – everything was different, living against the backdrop of the life and times he came from. When they stopped under the movie theater marquee, Emma calmly looked around, assessing the situation with her lips pressed firmly together.<p>

She expected this. She watched the experiment work once, and under the same conditions with the time circuits set to a different date and time, they were part of the second successful experiment. If anything, it was more successful; they had a dog travel over one minute, but she and Marty had just travelled over thirty years. So, from a scientific standpoint, it was incredible.

They just had the misfortune of… being interrupted… before the plutonium chamber was refilled.

"Come on," he said, leading her across the street.

Emma looked up for her bench, surprised to see how pristine everything before her really was. The town square was no longer a dead, gray void of metered parking and abundant litter for the court house officials; it was bright with perfect green grass, uniform hedges, and beautiful lush trees. A cannon and war memorial were at its center, an artist just off to the side with his easel and canvas. The courthouse looked not to have a chip or scuff on it anywhere, and when the clock gave a loud, resounding chime, she and Marty exchanged looks.

"I need to sit down," she said as he snatched a newspaper from a waste bin. She started to head for her bench – now as green and smooth as the square – when Marty grabbed her elbow, throwing away the newspaper and pointing towards the mint green corner café.

"You can sit down in there."

"Oh, good. I'm starving."

Marty kept Emma at his side as they crossed the street and slowly entered the aerobics-center-turned-café.

_Café-turned-aerobics-center?_

Irrelevant.

The large windows that usually harbored a view of women high-stepping in leotards were lined with teal green booths and a jukebox playing from the back wall. The shiny mint green of the exterior echoed throughout the café -the base of the large wrap-around counter, the stools, the walls. The floors looked like a blanket woven in Albuquerque, patterned with faded red and blue triangles and black lines on a tawny backdrop. The lights above the bar were akin to melting milk jugs – boxy, white wax that tapered to a point.

Backlit signs hung behind the bar advertising shakes, sundaes, and pie, and several large, wooden painted shapes of similar items were mounted on the walls. Small jars of candies, peanuts, and sprinkles for ice cream were on display next to the malt shakers. Clear and green glasses were aligned neatly on the shelves, all of the coffee cups with their handles facing the same direction. A man in a grey-blue jacket and a woman in a yellow dress sat at the front portion of the counter while a young man swept around them quietly.

Emma smiled at the woman behind the candy counter off to her right, eyes roaming over the vintage logos of the candy bars she passed every few days in the 7-11.

"Hey, kid, what'd you do? Jump ship? What's with the life preserver?"

She and Marty looked up at the man behind the counter, none other than who she presumed to be Lou himself. Marty was silent, clearly lost. Emma didn't blame him; there wasn't really a logical answer to the question.

"Breaking in new equipment for the Coast Guard," she said suddenly, patting Marty's 'life preserver' with a tight smile. He shot her a look. "Makes the family proud."

"Is that right? Thanks for serving," Lou said. "Can I get you something?"

Marty wet his lips. "I just want to use the phone."

Emma turned her head sharply. "Who do you know in 1955?" she whispered.

"Your dad."

Her eyes grew as she leaned away, and he nodded before glancing towards the counter.

"Go sit down and get something to eat. I'll be right out."

Swallowing the unexpected bitter taste in her mouth, she forced a smile and approached the counter as Marty headed over to the phone booth. Gingerly taking the stool next to the young man in the jacket, she smiled up at Lou, hoping to rid her mouth of the horrible sour fizzle.

"Cherry pie, please."

Lou gave her a look but headed down the bar. Emma smoothed her hands over the cool, white, glossy countertop in wait, smiling at the boy beside her when their eyes met briefly. He returned it, lowering his head again to his bowl of cereal and magazine. Lou returned with her pie and fork, setting a glass of milk in front of the boy.

"Would you like something to drink?"

"No, thank you."

As Emma picked up her fork and debated at which end of the slice she should start, the boy reached for his milk without looking up. He knocked it over.

A great milky flood flowed over the countertop, and the cup rolled off the back edge of the counter, smashing to the floor. Emma jumped from her stool just before the milk could run into her lap. She frowned as it claimed her slice of pie, the flaky crust now soggy from soaking up the milk. Lou was back in an instant, and the boy was shoving his things down to the opposite end of the bar.

"Oh. Oh, I'm so sorry," he said immediately, grabbing the towel Lou offered him. He fumbled around his bowl of cereal, clumsily spreading the towel over the mess. "I'm so sorry. I—Are you okay? Did I get any on you?"

Emma took a wad of napkins from the dispenser, pushing them into the stool with her good arm. She almost laughed. She had blood caked on her shirt under Marty's jacket, black smudges all over her white pants, and her hair was in a tussled ponytail.

"You couldn't have done much more damage if you did."

"Goldie! Help them clean this up!"

The young man with broom came over, and, excusing himself, laid his broom against the counter and squeezed in to where Emma had been sitting, wiping down the counter with skilled speed. Emma stood off to the side, and the boy swiveled around on his stool, half-afraid to look her in the eye.

"I really am sorry about your pie. I should have been paying more attention," he murmured, fiddling with the edge of his jacket. "Can I get you another?"

Emma felt bad. This overly apologetic boy was making every effort to deliver the refreshing chivalry of the fifties, but his hunched shoulders, withering voice, and lack of eye contact took away from the charm of the experience. All the same, she smiled.

"It's okay. It's just a piece of pie."

"Em?"

Emma turned around as Marty came up to her and surveyed the scene. Goldie finished with the countertop and its edge, and Lou nodded to her, placing a fresh slice of pie at her stool and a new glass of milk in front of the boy.

"What happened?"

"Just a spill. Everything's alright now."

Marty glanced up at the young man in the jacket. Flustered, the boy at the counter took one look at him and swiveled back around, carefully moving his milk to the other side of his cereal, away from Emma and her piece of pie lest he knock it over again. He buried his face in his magazine as Emma returned to the counter. Marty sat beside her, trying to get another look at this boy with the Corn Flakes.

"Who is that?"

"That's –" Emma paused, touching the young man's arm. He jumped.

"What?"

"I'm sorry," Emma said. "What is your name?"

"Hey, McFly, what do you think you're doing?"

All at once, the three teenagers at the counter turned towards the door – one confused, one curious, and one wishing a wormhole would manifest out of the air around him and swallow him wholly out of his miserable existence.

A teenage Biff Tannen stood in the doorway of Lou's Cafe with his cronies. Emma exchanged a fiercely confused glance with Marty until she realized that Biff was bearing down on the poor kid next to her, and subsequently, who the poor kid next to her was. As Biff heckled him about his homework, she looked back at Marty wide-eyed with a small smile of intrigue, but Marty had tunnel vision. The realization didn't seem so much fascinating as it was unbelievable to him.

George McFly. She was sitting next to Marty's future father.

And nearly getting knocked in the face with the Hill Valley's biggest asshole's elbow.

She blinked indignantly and leaned back towards Marty to avoid it as Biff knocked George on the head and grabbed his face, his three cohorts guffawing around them. Before she was even aware of it, words were leaving her mouth.

"Hey, stop it!"

Biff halted, releasing George's shirt. All eyes were suddenly on her. A flash of fear crossed Emma's face as he turned to her. Biff Tannen had lost a beer gut and gained a lot of muscles, making him seem much taller than she remember him being in 1985. She tried to sit tall, her shoulder screaming.

Biff snarled at her. "What's it to you, sweet cheeks?"

"Please don't hit him anymore."

"You volunteering to take it for him?"

In that instant, Marty put his arm in front of Emma, redirecting Biff's glare to himself. "Don't touch her."

"Who are you supposed to be?" 3-D laughed. "Her boyfriend?"

A chorus of more guffaws came as another of them said, "Hey, if this guy's bothering you, sweetheart, we can fix that."

"I'm not her boyfriend," Marty said a little too quickly. Emma glanced at the floor, and his heart sank a little. It had become such a reflex around his band mates. And in the face of this brawny, bullying Biff Tannen, he swallowed, embarrassed at how soft-spoken his response was. "I'm her brother."

Biff pouted at Emma as their chortles continued. "I'm sorry to hear that you're related to such a dork. Do you have a matching life preserver?"

Marty beat Emma's sharp tongue by grabbing her wrist to silence her oncoming retort. She stewed angrily as Biff and his gang rounded George once more about Biff's homework and smacked him in the face. Biff caught Emma's wince out of the corner of his eye and winked. Finally, they left with the parting threat of never seeing George in the café again, jumping into the black convertible right outside the front window.

Emma sighed, trying to let go of the frustration pent up in her chest now that they were gone. She leaned next to Marty's head, whispering in a hiss and removing her hand from his abruptly.

"You're my _brother_?"

The busboy Goldie came up to George, trying to give him a pep talk. Marty overheard the gist of it, but with Emma staring him down, he just held out his hands, trying to keep his voice down.

"What did you want me to say?"

"You didn't have to say anything!"

"He was threatening you!"

"Not that! Of course you say something about that."

"Would you have rather been my cousin?"

Emma rolled her eyes. Marty made a face.

"What? _What_?"

Emma leaned away, putting an end to their frenzied whispering and taking a mildly aggressive stab at her new slice of pie. Marty shook his head, startled to see that the stool beyond her was now empty. He sat up, eyes darting about as Emma stuffed another thick slice of pie into her mouth.

"Where did he go?"

A bicycle bell came from outside. Marty leapt from his stool, watching his not-yet-father ride up one side of the building and down the other. He grabbed Emma by the wrist, pulling her off the stool with cherry pie still in her mouth. He ran out the door with her, yelling after George. When Emma finally swallowed her pie, Marty had her by the wrist again.

"Come on!"

"Marty! What are we doing?"

"We're gonna lose him!"

**. Please Review .**


	5. Grandfather Paradox

**CHAPTER FOUR  
><strong>_**Grandfather Paradox**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
>9:55 AM<p>

Marty led them in a short run several blocks away. By that time, Emma tasted the buttery crust and sweet tartness of the cherry pie again, her head spinning from pain and nausea.

"This way."

"Marty, I can't," she panted, now cradling her left arm. "I have to sit down. I'm going to be sick."

She slid down the trunk of a nearby tree to the ground, resting her forehead on her knees. She turned away from the street, her good shoulder pressed into the course bark. The bullet wound pumped sweat to her brow. She shut her eyes, trying to breathe evenly.

Marty felt his stomach knot with guilt at the sight of her. Enough was enough. He shouldn't have let it go this long; she had a goddamn bullet in her, and he had to get her to a hospital. He paced the sidewalk next to her ready to suggest as much when he noticed the bike propped up against the other side of the tree – George's bike.

Marty stepped towards the street earnestly in search of his father. He was nowhere to been seen up and down and across the street, but at the hint of a few falling leaves, Marty looked up, surprised to see his father lying on a tree branch. With binoculars.

Marty followed the binoculars' line of sight to the top floor of the house directly across the street and glanced between the top right window and his father a few times. A young woman's torso was visible through the bright green treetop edging the window. Very visible, in fact – she wore only her undergarments, white as the window frame and curtains surrounding her. Marty glanced between the girl's adjustments and his dad's eager crawl further up the limb. Realizing just what he was witnessing was yet another moment in Marty's life where he was not proud of the scrawny guy above him. Marty made a face somewhere between disgust and disappointment as more leaves fell from overhead.

"He's a Peeping Tom!"

Emma's eyes fluttered open from the other side of the tree. She tried to shift in the direction of Marty's voice. "Who is?"

Just then, George dropped out of the tree and into the middle of the street on all fours. Emma started at his materialization, glancing from him to the tree limb to Marty in quick succession. She placed her hand against the trunk to stand, and halfway there, Marty's voice broke over the peaceful suburban street.

"Dad!"

Followed by a car horn.

She didn't hear herself shriek; she felt her shoulder pain buckle her knees as one hand grabbed the tree and the other flew to her mouth. In the span of time it took her to blink, Marty had raced into the street towards his father, pushed the awkward kid to the other curb, and unsuccessfully braced himself into the hood of the moving car. Marty backpedalled from the force until he was on the ground, the sound of his head bouncing off the asphalt making Emma's stomach drop.

"Marty!"

Dogs barked from neighboring yards. Sky and trees meshed with crooked houses. He lifted his head in her direction. It lingered momentarily, eyes clouded as she hurried to him. Before she could reach him, however, his head dropped to the pavement once more.

"Marty! Oh my god!"

Emma knelt, her hands trembling slightly as she checked the back of Marty's head.

"Marty, please, please, wake up," she murmured, lifting one of his eyelids. She patted his chest gingerly, then took a fistful of his shirt and shook more vigorously.

"Marty!"

"Is he breathing?"

Emma looked up at the portly man standing over her. "Yeah, he's breathing, but he won't wake up," she rattled out without taking her own breath. "He was standing right there and –"

"Hey, wait a minute! Who are you?"

George stumbled past them in a daze, his face flush with adrenaline. He met Emma's eyes once, and they silently apologized with a glance from Marty's motionless body to her wide eyes. Emma's shoulders fell in disbelief when he turned his bike around and sped away. She made to shout after him in desperation, but the gentleman's hand touched her injured shoulder, and a cry leapt from her throat instead.

Sam Baines stepped back. "What's the matter with you?" he asked incredulously. "You were clear over there!"

"Oh for goodness sakes, Sam, what happened this time?"

Emma slowly unfolded herself, biting her lip to stay the tears in her eyes. A pair of tidy red women's loafers approached from the other side of Marty. The owner, a homey woman, stout like her husband, rested her hands on her hips with a sigh and shook her head at the scene before her.

"He came out of nowhere, Stella!" Sam said, gesturing wildly at Marty. "Him and her and some other kid that took off down the street!"

"Honestly, Sam…"

"Don't you kids know to look both ways before you cross the street?"

"Sam."

The man withheld further complaints with a wary eye at Emma, ultimately offering his hand. Emma swallowed, carefully accepting with her right hand. A grimace flooded her face regardless, and she pulled her left arm into her chest when the Baines stooped to get Marty to his feet. The cherry pie hit the back of her tongue. As Sam and Stella fixed one of Marty's arms around each of them, she shut her eyes again to dispel the vertigo.

"Is this young man your brother?"

Emma opened her eyes, heart hammering.

"Ye-yes."

"Aw, well then, you come inside with us, honey," Stella said. "Come on, now. We'll take care of him."

Emma hesitantly followed. She looked down the street in the direction in which George had taken off and back to Marty's head swinging lifelessly between his shoulders. Nearing the door, she inhaled as much of the cool morning air as she could to settle her scattered wits before Stella ushered her inside a living room wallpapered with tiny bunches of blue flowers and family pictures.

"Milton! Toby! Come help your father!"

Emma finally calmed her psyche enough with one last deep breath, the scent of brown sugar, cigars, and freshly pressed clothes hitting the bottom of her lungs. Two boys came running around the corner with a little girl in tow, the tallest in a coonskin cap. The younger boy's mouth fell open.

"Wow, Dad! What'd you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Sam repeated sternly. "He ran in front of the car. Grab his leg, Toby."

"Did you kill him?"

The girl pouted. "Daddy killed him?"

"No, sweetheart, Daddy didn't kill anybody," Stella reassured gently, touching the girl's light tresses. "It was just an accident. We're going to let him rest, then he'll be good as new."

_Thud_.

The three girls looked up the stairs sharply. Sam guided the boys in maneuvering Marty's head out of a baluster.

"Watch it, Milton."

"Toby did it!"

Stella frowned at her husband, to which he grumbled "We're going, Stella," through gritted teeth. "Watch the corner, boys. Get under his knee there. Sally? His shoe fell off. Pick that up for me."

Stella Baines cast the disheveled girl next to the plant stand an apologetic look. Her blonde hair was poking out of a ponytail in odd tufts, her pants were stained with brown and gray streaks, and the oversized denim jacket she sported made her face look frailer and paler than she probably would otherwise. If she hadn't been there right after it had happened, Stella would have thought this poor girl was the victim of Sam's negligent driving, not the boy currently being toted upstairs.

Ever the model hostess, Stella gave Emma a kind smile, her hands clasped neatly in front of her.

"There is another bed upstairs if you care to rest, too. Or you can sit in the family room over here."

Sam, Toby, and Milton continued to grumble at one another as they disappeared up to the next landing, little Sally in tow with Marty's shoe. Emma glanced up the stairs after them while horribly sour cherries still burned the back of her throat, Stella waiting patiently for her reply. Blinking back her nausea, Emma swallowed, slowly nodding once at the stairs.

"I'd like to stay with my brother. Make sure he's okay."

"Of course," Stella practically cooed, touching her arm. "It's right up at the top of the stairs here."

As feather-light as Mrs. Baines's touch had been, the nerves in Emma's shoulder lit up. She bit her lip, quickly moving directly behind the woman to hide the pained twist of her features. Gingerly holding her left arm against herself again, Emma ascended the stairs behind Stella as casually as she could.

The last to reach the top landing, Emma followed everyone into the door off to the right. She stepped to the left of Mrs. Baines as her husband and three children fixed Marty under the large comforter of the nearest bed. Emma's stomach flipped all over again seeing him in such a state. She'd seen him unconscious twice before, but both instances were hardly as upsetting as this. He had come to almost immediately those other times.

This unresponsiveness made her want to snap a rubber band right between his eyes. That would wake him up.

"Take his other shoe off, Sally."

The little girl untied Marty's shoe and took it off, placing it at the foot of the bed with the one that had fallen off on their way upstairs. When the two boys and Mr. Baines had him settled, Emma silently approached the bedside. She looked him over gravely, willing him to open his eyes.

_Stuck in 1955 and you get hit by a car. _

_Wake up, you big sissy._

From the other side of the bed, Mrs. Baines came into her peripheral vision with a damp washcloth and bowl of water. She squeezed the excess water from the cloth and carefully dabbed his brow, frowning at the bruise blossoming just along his hairline. Emma stared at it, wondering how on earth he had received a bruise there when he has fallen backward.

Then she remembered Marty's head greeted nearly every baluster up to the bedroom.

"It's not too bad," Stella assured, seeing Emma's stony expression. "I'm sure he'll sleep it off. Maybe not without a good headache, but I think we can assume it could have been much worse."

Emma mentally let out an exasperated sigh. Who was she to say it wasn't? You weren't supposed to let people with head trauma just_ go to sleep_. He probably had a concussion from as hard as his head had bounced. Bleeding? Memory loss? Those could just be discounted, too, because the nice homemaker put him to bed and said so?

Emma practically glowered at Marty. _If this is your sad attempt to get me to the hospital…it might work_, she admitted to herself. Her knees felt weak again.

"Oh, dear, you look so pale," Stella said, putting the bowl and washcloth on the small nightstand between the two beds. "I would be, too, if I had been through what you have."

If Stella Baines had truly had any idea of just what Emma had been through in the last twelve hours, Emma was sure that the woman would faint on the spot. But as it was Emma who stood a great chance of fainting herself, she didn't object to Stella's offer of rest; she shuffled over to the other bed wordlessly and sat on its edge.

"There now."

Amongst the bowl on the nightstand, two small, white porcelain swans and a box of tissues fell silent as the tall lampshade above them darkened with the pull of a chain. The handful of framed pictures on the wall became faceless, and the layers of wispy white curtains behind her stilled once Stella moved a few of the smaller pillows to the end of the bed. Emma adjusted the ones that remained as Mrs. Baines smiled from the doorway.

"Get some rest, dear. We'll check on your brother in a bit."

Emma couldn't tell if she had expressed her thanks aloud before Mrs. Baines closed the door, but the moment she had, Emma squeezed her eyes shut as her cheek touched the pillow, curling onto her right side.

Her injured shoulder throbbed angrily above her. A few shaky exhales trembled out of her. A small sniffle. She had never felt such searing, mind-numbing pain before, not even when the welding torch got her leg a few years ago. She tried focusing on parts of her body that were uninjured, but this bullet wound was all-encompassing, refusing to be ignored. It made her temples scream, the space between her shoulder blades stabbed with each breath.

Emma looked at Marty, the few clumps of damp hair at his brow poking out like odd shadows in the dim room. She was briefly jealous of his unconscious state; he could escape this awful reality without memory for a while and wake believing he had dreamt it all.

And with such terrible pain exhausting her, Emma's heavy limbs and gentled heartbeat were a welcomed gift as she slowly fell out of the whirlwind of her waking world. Her eyelids touched and opened; touched, opened. She watched Marty's chest rise and fall with soft exhales and matched them, soon fast asleep.

* * *

><p>A cool autumn thundershower moved over Hill Valley sometime in the late afternoon. Rain fell steadily over the grayed town, coursing along metal gutters and trickling through the foliage of trees to the damp earth below. Small streams of water ran along the streets and sidewalks outside the Baines residence, and while dusk was not very far off, the streetlights came on earlier than they normally would have.<p>

Emma's wound roused her with a moderate ache, but then a sudden, hot stab sent her gasping into the pillow. She took a few calming breaths, listening to the leaves brush rainwater against the window. Her eyes opened on Marty weakly; he was still out like a light. As much as she just wanted to go back to sleep until he woke up, it was apparent that the bullet hole in her shoulder wasn't going to let her.

Sliding her feet to the floor and using great amounts of effort to get upright through the pain, Emma stood at Marty's bedside, casting an uneasy frown over him. She moved his tuft of brown hair aside with the back of her hand, and even in the poor lighting, she could make out the bruised spot high on his forehead. Her fingertips grazed it tenderly; it wasn't as badly swollen as she had anticipated. It was more so the back of his head that concerned her, the split-second image of it hitting the pavement replaying in her mind.

She sighed, letting his hair fall back over his brow.

_You are so stupid sometimes._

Marty said nothing.

She lingered another thirty seconds before wondering if the Baines kept Tylenol; if memory served from health class last year, 1955 was the year an acetaminophen suspension was released for children, but the drug wasn't going to be a staple in the American home for a while yet. Besides, a bottle of that elixir would probably be a drop in the bucket towards relieving her pain.

Once they found her father and got home, she would relent and go to the hospital if her dad and Marty hadn't carried her there first.

Emma ventured over to the white oak bedroom door, quietly turning the knob. As she looked up to peer out into the hallway, she started; a young woman's face was inches from hers just on the other side of the door. She leaned back in surprise, batting her wide, pretty eyes shyly.

"Hi. I was just coming to check on you and," - she craned her neck to try and see past Emma, a sweet, breathy sigh on her words – "your brother."

Emma nodded once, eyeing her.

"My name is Lorraine."

And there it was – the odd sense of familiarity that was beating her over the head suddenly had a name, and Emma's eyes grew slightly.

Marty's mother! What were the chances that they had encountered both of Marty's parents in the same day, let alone it being the very day her father had punched into the keypad of the time circuits as the day he invented time travel?

She had only met Mrs. McFly a handful of times, usually when Marty took a rare turn in having her over to work on their school projects at his house. In those brief encounters, Emma was sometimes within earshot when Mr. McFly called his wife by her first name. And while thirty years and fifty pounds had definitely transformed the woman, her face was unmistakable. So many of her young, soft features reminded her of Marty in an instant, and Emma almost laughed at how absurd this day was turning out to be. She wouldn't speculate for fear of what might happen, but anything seemed possible.

"I'm Emma," she managed. "Do you know what time it is?"

"It's almost 8:30," Lorraine said, glancing over at the nearby clock on the wall. "I wanted to see if you were both awake. We're about to have a late dinner."

Oh, sweet merciful heavens, she could smell the meatloaf and buttered rolls as if Lorraine were holding them right under her nose. She suddenly became aware of how hungry she was; she hadn't eaten anything proper in nearly twenty-four hours, save for those two or three bites of pie. And despite how ill the pain from her shoulder had her, she was certain she could tuck away a good meal without hesitation right now, feel even worse later, and regret nothing.

Emma stepped back, opening the door a little wider for Lorraine to enter. "He's still asleep."

Lorraine stood in the dark doorway, tightening her sweater around herself as she stared at the boy in her sister's bed, intrigued.

"Oh. Well, go on down to dinner. I just finished helping set the table."

Emma went out into the hallway, turning back to see that, instead of following, Lorraine had retreated further into the dark bedroom.

"Aren't you coming?"

"I'll be down in a minute," Lorraine assured her, closing the door so that only her face was poking through with an overly polite smile. "I just want to make sure he's doing alright."

Emma stared. Was she really getting kicked out of the bedroom where _her_ friend was unconscious and hurt? By his future mother? Did she somehow know it was her son?

Whatever it was, she was acting strange enough for tiny red flags to pop up in the back of Emma's mind. She felt the urge to rush back into the room and assert herself as Marty's liaison and caretaker. It was some juvenile jealousy doing this to her, and although she scolded herself, she knew that if had been Jennifer Parker edging her out of the room instead of his future mother, she would have a lot more to say.

"You should get some meatloaf as soon as it's sliced," Lorraine suggested. "And the mashed potatoes before Milton eats them all."

Oh. Food.

Marty was fine.

"Thanks."

Awkwardly starting downstairs by herself, Emma's straightened when she heard the bedroom door shut. Part of her wasn't really sure what just happened, but it sent more red flags up in the distance.

Just as she made up her mind to go back for Marty and strongly suggest that they had to leave, the two boys that had helped carry him upstairs with their father that morning came out of a different bedroom, galloping towards her. They paused their horseplay when they saw her in the middle of the stairs, but it didn't seem to deter them; the smaller boy beamed at her.

"Are you staying for dinner?"

Emma gave a small smile. "That's where I'm headed."

"Come on, then!" Toby said, leading her and Milton downstairs to the dining room. "Mom! This girl's awake! She said she's staying for dinner!"

Stella came round from the kitchen with a perfect meatloaf in hand. Emma felt blissfully happy as the heavy, savory steam knocked her between the eyes. She returned Mrs. Baines's smile genuinely.

"That… smells amazing."

"Tastes even better," Stella winked, setting it on the table. "Come sit down and help yourself. As you can see from the way my boys eat, I've made plenty."

Toby hurried to pull up an extra chair, and Emma could hardly take her eyes off the table as she sat down. Platters and bowls and dishes spanned the whole of the tabletop in a picturesque display. Within two minutes, Emma had a full plate. And by the time she'd realized Marty was taking a seat next to her, half her slice of meatloaf and most of the mashed potatoes were gone. Her fork hovered over her plate when she caught Marty eyeing her. She swallowed without breaking eye contact; she was not going to apologize for enjoying this meal or the glob or gravy in the corner of her mouth.

"You know, Marty, you look so familiar," Stella said. "Do I know your mother?"

Marty and Emma both sat straight at this, Emma busying herself with wiping her mouth so her eyes couldn't dart to Lorraine as Marty's had.

"Yeah, I think maybe you do."

"Oh, then I want to give her a call. I don't want her to worry about the two of you."

"You can't. That is…nobody's home."

"Oh."

"Yet."

"Oh."

Emma raised an eyebrow at her 'brother' during a long sip of milk. Marty could see a hint of amusement in her face as she lowered the glass, forced to smile into her napkin at the increasing exasperation of his level brow. Having won round two of their awkward staring contests in front of his future relatives, Marty was about to slip the telephone book page from his pocket he had taken from Lou's that morning when Lorraine spoke up.

"Mother, with their parents out of town, don't you think they ought to spend the night? After all, Dad almost killed him with the car."

Emma leaned forward, just now realizing how close Lorraine was to Marty. She gripped her fork.

"That's true," Stella considered. "I think you should spend the night. I think you're our responsibility."

"I don't know…"

"Marty can sleep in my room."

Immediately, Marty leapt backwards from the table, nearly knocking his chair over. Before she could even glare at him, Marty yanked Emma up by her good arm. She stumbled, ungracefully catching herself on little Joey's playpen.

"We gotta go! We gotta go, right Em?"

"Yeah," she agreed blindly as Marty marched her to the door by the small of her back. "Time to go."

"That's right! Time to go. Thanks very much, it was wonderful, you were all great, see you all later," he said, pushing Emma out the door. "_Much_ later."

**. Please Review .**


	6. Suspended Animation

**CHAPTER FIVE  
><strong>_**Suspended Animation**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
>9:22 PM<p>

Marty continued dragging Emma down the street until they were out of sight of and still another block past the Baines' house. Emma demanded to know if he had a good reason for hauling her out of there before she even got to grab a roll for the road, and after Marty's curt explanation of his mother's not-so-motherly touch, she backed off.

"Damn! I meant to ask them where Riverview Drive was."

"Riverside?"

"Yeah, look." He took out the phonebook page from that morning and shared it with Emma, pointing to Doc's listed address. Emma laughed, handing the page back to him almost immediately.

"That's the mansion's address. Riverview was renamed for Kennedy not long after the place burned down and Dad sold the land."

"So we're looking for a mansion."

"_Ding ding ding._"

Marty slowed his speed walk to that of a leisurely stroll lest Emma collapse against another tree. He wasn't exactly sure how she had made it through the day without her shoulder bleeding through his jacket, but he was also glad that wasn't the case. She plodded along beside him expressionlessly, maybe on the verge of a stumble here or there. Her posture was normal, but Marty could see the weight of everything settling on her that much more.

"How are you holding up, Em?"

"I'll be fine until we get to my dad's. The rest and food really helped."

It was dumb to ask if she was in a lot of pain. He could see her hiding it ever since the parking lot, and she was doing a hell of a job. She was right to call him a big sissy sometimes; she handled pain way better than he did, but he'd never tell her that.

But as they turned a corner under the soft rustle of an overhead oak tree, the street lamps gave away her grimace.

"I'm sorry about, you know," – he jerked his head over his shoulder – "back there."

"For what?"

"Well, they are my family. I just feel like I should apologize for them for anything."

Emma smiled. "Your family was fine. If you're going to apologize for anything, apologize for jumping in front of a car and scaring me half to death."

It was Marty's turn to smile. "I scared you?"

"You _jumped in front of a moving vehicle_," Emma chided. "Then proceeded to remain unconscious, essentially leaving me by myself in 1955."

"I had good reason."

"Yeah, and it might have killed you. _I_ was going to kill you if you had woken up with no memory. Do I need to get you a leash?"

"Chill out, Em. Everything's fine."

She gave him a look that made him recoil slightly.

"Okay, so everything _will be_ fine. Once we see your dad."

_Once we see your dad._

God, what was that going to be like? Granted, it hadn't completely sunk in that the last eighteen hours had been reality, least of all losing Doc in such a violent way. He was battling to process everything, let alone what Emma must be trying to talk herself through.

It was going to be the biggest relief to reach Doc. They were in the clear once they had him. Maybe it would feel like nothing had happened at all when they knocked on his door. It will have all been a nightmare.

_Why can't it all just be nightmare?_

"Marty."

He stopped. Emma had crossed the street, the sign above her head embossed with gold letters that read RIVERVIEW.

"Look both ways, stupid," she called as he jogged over to her. He matched her slow pace, pushing his hands into his pockets. He clutched the lining up in his fists absentmindedly, his right forefinger grazing a penny.

"Em, has it hit you yet?"

"What? About my dad?"

"…Everything."

She sighed, not looking up. Pieces of her long bangs freed themselves from her ponytail in the light wind, brushing across her face. "No. And to be honest, I don't think the feeling will pass anytime soon."

"Did you maybe want to wait while I talked to him?"

Emma shook her head. She appreciated what he was saying, but part of her had to see her father, even if he wasn't her father yet, and even if it was just to look at him.

"He's not my dad yet," she repeated aloud to herself.

Marty raised an eyebrow. "I guess not yet."

"He can't know I'm his daughter then."

"What?"

"Marty, it's 1955. Whether he buys this time travel thing or not, announcing I'm his daughter isn't going to be a good idea."

"Oh, come on," Marty said. "He'll work ten times harder to get us home by morning if you told him."

"He could also not like me and decide not to have kids."

"Really?"

"I do have my mother's attitude. And if memory serves, she is his least favorite person right now." She groaned in frustration. "I know I don't sound like I'm making any sense. It's complicated, Marty. And it's safer if he doesn't know yet."

Marty nodded his understanding. "So, you're just a lackey around the lab like me?"

She blew a raspberry. "No, I'm an assistant. I'm not a lackey."

"Excuuuuse me."

* * *

><p>A few minutes later, a glowing box that read 1640 appeared along the sidewalk. Eyes following a grand brick driveway beyond it, the Brown Mansion towered from a small hilltop that dwarfed the garage they both called home in 1985. Lit with lights from an impeccably well-kept expanse of lawn, the rich architecture, warm lighting, and commanding grandeur of the place drew silent awe from its onlookers.<p>

Marty glanced over at Emma's bright curiosity, nudging her until she acknowledged him amidst her captivation. She'd seen pictures from before the fire, yes, but pictures didn't do this place justice.

"Ready?"

"As I can be."

Marty lead the way, mindful of Emma's determination not to baby her arm as they ascended the long, curved pathway. A large stone stoop welcomed them before a heavy wooden and stained glass door. Emma reached out, touching the cool, elaborate moldings. Marty's sharp knocking pulled her out of her trancelike wonder, and she turned around with him to look out over the street.

"You have got to be pissed that this place burned down," Marty said, taking in the wide yard and flowering trees. "Hell, _I'm_ a little pissed."

Emma shrugged. "What are you gonna do, you know?"

"Suggest he call an electrician and get the wires checked?"

The door flew open suddenly.

Marty and Emma spun around, catching a glimpse of who they assumed to be Doc probing his wild eyes through the crack at them before slamming the door shut again. Intrigued and startled alike, the two of them stepped toward the door in unison. Emma tried to squint through the stained glass pane to make out any kind of shape or shadow beyond it as Marty leaned toward the doorjamb hesitantly.

"Doc?"

The door again flew open, all the way this time, and Marty and Emma drew back in surprise. After she shook the sting from her eyes by the sudden barrage of the indoor lighting, Emma came face-to-face with a middle-aged Emmett Brown, a shockingly large cage-like thing strapped to his head. His eyes were as wide and wild as ever, and before she or Marty even had a chance to draw a breath to speak, Doc grabbed each of them by their jackets and yanked them inside.

"Don't say a word."

* * *

><p>Emma dizzily came to a standstill as the door was slammed, trying to get her bearings. Her father was thirty years younger, nearly unrecognizable aside from what little personality they had just experienced. His cottony hair was shorter and light blond, and his hands weren't nearly as calloused or cracked as she'd known them to be. His casual luau shirts and khakis were a thing of the future; he looked so straight-laced with a tie and tucked-in shirt. His cuffs were even buttoned. Outrageous headgear aside, he almost looked alien to her.<p>

Then there was the matter of this _silver snakeskin robe._

Yep. Everything was going to be okay.

She stumbled over a thick, red rug carpeting the smoky foyer after Marty and her young father. Dying plants hung amidst glossy wooden panels and crossbeams, intricate stained glass lamps, and a scattered assortment of blueprints, tools, and random odds and ends. Her dad led them over to a crude, haphazardly stacked pillar of knobs, wiring, scrap metal, and dials emitting the foul-smelling electrical burn and frighteningly healthy _zaps_. Coupled with the nausea from her pain, she felt herself grow pale and lightheaded.

But it was impossible to look away from that contraption on the top her father's head.

"I don't want to know anything about you!"

"Doc!"

"Quiet!"

She glanced at the dog not unlike Einstein as he was unhooked from a smaller, less impressive head unit and jumped into a riveted leather armchair behind them. She redirected herself back to the sprawling thing on her dad's head, standing right next to him as she examined the vacuum tube heavily wrapped in electrical tape that ran down his back and into the misshapen, sizzling tower. She suddenly realized what this Neanderthal of an invention was, narrowing her eyes as Doc silenced Marty's protesting with a blue, wired suction cup to the forehead.

"I'm gonna read your thoughts," Doc announced, pointing at Marty. He reached over to the top of the crackling scrap pile, suddenly jerking his head away from a hollow tapping next to his left ear. He scowled at the girl next to him.

"Don't touch that!"

Emma lowered her hand but continued to examine his helmet. Clearing his throat, Emmett turned his attention back to the kid in the life preserver, rejuvenating his gusto with a deep breath. He flipped a switch, twisted a knob, and planted his foot in front of Marty, straightening the headgear.

"I am going to read your thoughts."

Marty glanced at Emma, expecting to see her tucked into a silent shell of shock off to the side of Doc, revering in the fact that she was seeing her father, in some strange way, back from the dead. Instead of getting caught up in a mind-boggling stupor over that, however, it appeared that his Chem lab partner was occupied with a different upsetting conundrum, continuing to scrutinize the heavy metal unit on Doc's head with a look of disgust.

"You've come from a great dist-"

"Whyare you squeezing it into your head like that?"

Emmett cast her an annoyed frown, readjusting. "To concentrate and stabilize the neuropaths of the brain waves! Now, quiet! I need absolute silence!"

She raised her eyebrows. "That –"

"_Shhhh!_"

Emma bit her tongue, eyes darkening as they smoothly met Marty's. He beseeched her for help, for a silent acknowledgement that yes, of course now was not the time to analyze his brain waves via primitive suction cup in their current predicament. Marty could barely hold onto a single thought himself for the past day, so _good luck on that one_, he thought at the erratic scientist.

Doc readied himself again, but he felt the girl's hard stare on him and slowly looked over at her, eyeballing her impatiently. She raised her eyebrows again, and he groaned.

"Just say your piece so I can get on with this without any more interruption!"

Emma leapt at the opportunity. "Pushing that thing into your skull is going to short out your nervous system with that many amperes crowding the parietal condenser."

She reached up, plucking a black wire out of place on the helmet and sending Emmett reeling off to the side incredulously.

"What in God's name do you think you're doing?!" he shouted, pressing the helmet to his head with great protectiveness.

"Of course, I don't even know why you have a _parietal _condenser when the theta and delta waves are most prominently coded in the temporal lobe."

"I'm not trying to read theta and delta waves; I'm trying to read his beta waves," Doc said, smacking the back of one hand into the palm of the other. "His active, in-the-present, _now_ thoughts!"

"I can read his thoughts just by the look on his face!"

Emmett narrowed his eyes on her. "Do you know what this is?" he hissed, pointing at the machine. "It's an electroencephalograph."

"I know what an EEG is."

"State-of-the-art electrical brain wave mapping system."

"With a very high _temporal resolution_ –"

"And I am about to have a breakthrough in neurolinguistics by translating _those_ impulses –!"

"Hey!"

Emma and Doc looked over at Marty. He had no idea what had just been said, but it was time to bring their conversation back from the far reaches of space. Thirty years apart and they could still argue fluidly in the foreign language of science. Though Emma probably had the upper hand now.

He pulled the suction cup from his forehead, settling his wide eyes on Emma. She relaxed her defensive stance, suddenly feeling a painful rush of lightheadedness from the heated exchange. She nodded to Marty rather weakly, sitting in the now-empty riveted armchair. Marty took a deep breath as she sat, meeting Doc's eye anxiously.

"Doc, we're from the future. We came here in a time machine that you invented. Now, we need your help to get back to the year 1985."

Doc looked between the two of them, anger touching his skeptical tone.

"Time machine? I haven't invented any time machine."

Emma looked around the side of the chair, back at Doc. "You will. Everything I just said about condensers and delta waves and coding? I learned it all from you."

After another moment, Emmett chuckled and motioned to Emma. "Impressive, my dear, but not convincing."

He promptly removed the small cage from the top of his head, striding past Emma's indignant scowl to the octagonal table in the rear of the foyer. Marty hurried to join him, pleading as the irritated scientist picked up a set of calipers.

"Come on, Doc! You've gotta help us! You're the only one who knows how your time machine works!"

"Honestly," Emmett chided, "tell whoever sent you here that they have sufficiently ridiculed the crackpot for one evening, won't you? I have work to do."

Emma's tired chuckle pricked his ears. "_You_ sent us here."

Doc pointed the calipers at her warningly, but Marty then took out the contents of his wallet, desperately trying to convince Doc of the validity of their plight. A bout of vertigo took Emma as she watched her not-yet-father frown at the items skeptically, and she rested her head against the side of the armchair and shut her eyes.

She held her breath as the pain made her stomach churn, trying not to let a groan or hiss pass her lips. But in doing so, her lightheadedness increased, and the distressed assertions of Marty and haughty mockery of her father floated higher and higher up until she was straining to hear them. Her head throbbed once, like a shockwave rippling over her brain, and her father's voice was suddenly breaking over her and Marty angrily as he snatched up several rolls of blueprints.

"Who's _vice_ president? _Jerry Lewis_?"

A fresh breath of autumn air touched Emma's face, and she inhaled its pleasant chill as the voices around her began to fall away again. Emma squinted over at the table, ready to just chuck something at this thickheaded imbecile of a scientist her future father was being when she saw that he and Marty had vanished.

Emma sat up in the chair, eyes darting over to the opened back door. Their shouts reverberated outside, and she was half-afraid her father's patience had run its course and that Marty stood a good chance of getting zapped with something. With one more inhale of the refreshing breeze, Emma forced herself out of the chair and out the door, cradling her left elbow.

Marty had chased Doc down the manicured lawn to the garage. She hurried to catch up as Doc locked himself inside, her body quite opposed to the jostle of the light jog towards Marty's frantic run-on sentence.

"You were standing on your toilet, and you were hanging a clock, and you fell, and you hit your head on the sink! And that's when you came up with the idea for the flux capacitor," he said, slowly turning to look back as Emma approached, "which is… what… makes time travel possible."

Emma panted, she and Marty briefly stewing in the fear of defeat before Doc threw the door open again, stricken and wide-eyed. He glanced over at the girl – this girl that had spouted all this brainwave stuff at him without hesitation – and his eyebrows deepened in confusion.

She had paled within seconds, beads of perspiration dotted along her hairline. Then, her vacant eyes rolled back into her head, and she crumpled to the brick driveway.

"Emma!" Marty fell to her side, horrified that he hadn't caught her. "Shit!"

Emmett blinked as if he had missed something. "What's wrong with her?"

"She has a bullet in her shoulder."

"A bullet?" He huffed. "How did I get mixed up in this kind of riffraff?"

"No, Doc, it was an accident, ju- Doc, please." Marty looked up at him, a whole different plea in his eyes now. "You have _got_ to help us. You're our only hope. Please."

The hardened disposition Emmett had fronted from so many practical jokes waned with the flux capacitor story, and it did so further at the helplessness in this young man's voice.

And he wasn't about to let some girl die in his front yard.

Attitude shifting across his face, Emmett quickly knelt, helping Marty gather her up. "Why didn't you seek medical attention?"

"She refused to go to the hospital," Marty said, standing with Emma in his arms. "We just wanted to find you and get home."

Emmett pressed his lips together, watching the dead weight of the girl's head loll into Marty's orange vest. "She may not have to go. After we remove the bullet, I'll make a call."

"You sure you can get it out?"

"Let's get her inside."

**. Please Review .**


	7. Stroke of Luck

**CHAPTER SIX  
><strong>_**Stroke of Luck**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
>10:35 PM<p>

Marty wasn't certain of Doc's level of medicinal expertise; he had married a nurse, yes, but not yet, and even then Marty couldn't accurately gauge the degree of knowledge Doc would have obtained from her. Doc was a surprising individual in many ways, but Marty doubted very much that he knew how to remove bullets from shoulders. At this point in time, however, it was what they had to work with.

Marty repositioned Emma in his arms and followed Doc up the driveway. He felt the wet warmth of blood seeping through the denim jacket to his shirt sleeve as he maneuvered sideways through the front door, all the while beating himself up for not making her go to the hospital that morning.

"Lie her on her stomach when we get upstairs," Doc said through the foyer. "I'll need you to cut away the fabric so I can access the wound."

"Right."

At the top of the stairs, Emmett entered the door to the right, urgently ushering Marty inside. He helped him lie Emma amidst the lavish crimson and brown pillows and elegantly embroidered comforter on the four-post bed, tossing some of the satin pillows to the floor. Marty went to the far side of the bed, nearest her injury, and turned on a bright lamp.

"That's good, that's good," Doc said, retrieving a pair of scissors from the bureau drawer and handing them to Marty. "Here. And keep this blanket handy in case she goes into shock. She may still lose more blood before I get the bullet out. I'll get some towels and alcohol."

Marty nodded as Doc went into the bathroom, his mind now scattered to the point that he looked at the scissors as if he had no idea what to do with them. After a moment of self-recollection, he sat them down to take his jacket off Emma, slightly nauseated at how large the stain beneath it had become. The sock and sleeve were completely saturated, and he cut them away first, dropping them on top of his jacket on the floor.

Holding his breath, Marty pinched the collar of her shirt and started cutting. The overpowering smell made him stop when Emmett returned. The scientist's eyes grew at the sight, but in seeing Marty's state, he did his best to keep the boy grounded.

"It's alright," he said, setting towels on the bed and a tray on the nightstand. "It's not as bad as it looks. Just cut."

Marty did so, cutting the length of her spine. When he finished, he handed the scissors to Doc.

"Easy does it," Doc said. "Don't pull too hard."

Marty cringed as he peeled the matted material from her sticky skin. Another strong, metallic waft hit them, and Marty coughed. When he had the sopping fabric off her back, Doc immediately pressed a cloth to the injury and inserted a needle next to it.

"What is that?" Marty asked.

Doc removed the syringe and rag. "Procaine. Numbing agent. Hold this pan."

Marty took the tiny, white metal bowl, watching on bated breath as Doc leaned over the crater in Emma's shoulder with a cloth damp with alcohol and a pair of surgical scissors. He swallowed uncomfortably as the thin, curved tip entered the bullet hole. More blood began to leak out.

"Is it supposed to be doing that?"

"Everything's fine," Doc assured, squinting down into the wound.

Suddenly, in seeing Doc calmly search for the fragment in Emma's shoulder, it dawned on Marty that this man was saving his daughter's life and didn't even know it. What was more; Emma had been injured as a result of something Doc didn't even know he had done yet. It was like some strange full-circle redemption or karma. He couldn't imagine how Doc would react to all this in 1985.

And then he realized… Doc _wouldn't_ have a reaction to any of this in 1985.

A small weight dropped into pan with a dense _ping_. Marty looked down at the blunt bullet fragment, little red dots on the white bowl from where it had danced around. He looked over at her shoulder as Doc wiped it clean with a wet washcloth.

"Where is this time machine I invented?"

"Uh, out by the Lyon Estates development," Marty said, patting the skin dry. "We came in at Peabody's farm before it stalled out."

"Stalled out? It's a car?"

"Yeah. What'd you think it was? A refrigerator?"

Emmett shook his head thoughtfully as he swabbed the area with iodine and layered it with gauze; whatever the shape this time-travelling vessel was, he still wouldn't believe it until he saw it.

Marty helped him secure the bandages with copious amounts of thick tape and replace everything to the tray on the nightstand. Doc then collected the bloodied rags and clothes, throwing them in a cold bath.

Marty examined Emma's face, half-hoping she would open her eyes so he knew she was really going to be okay. Her bare back rose and fell gently, however, and it was enough to pacify him for the time being.

Now he understood why she had given him third-degree earlier.

He picked up the spare blanket and threw it open above her. It billowed and fell in waves over her body, creating small hills and valleys between her and the pillows. He pulled the edge up over her shoulders, minding the bandages. Once the numbing stuff wore off, he couldn't imagine the kind of pain she'd be in.

"Well," Doc said, emerging from the bathroom, "let's go get it."

Marty pocketed one hand and motioned to his unconscious friend with the other. "What about Emma?"

"She'll be out for an hour or two, likely until the pain returns. We'll let her rest until we get back."

Marty reluctantly shut off the bedside lamp and allowed Doc to lead him away from the bed. At the door, they looked back. When Emma remained dormant, they slipped out of the doorway, allowing the door to shut quietly in their wake.

* * *

><p>Emma felt herself choking back a few sobs when she muddled back into existence. Hot, throbbing pain pulsated into her back and arm, and a twinge shot up her neck from lying face down. The room was dark, save for the few threads of the lawn's lights peaking in from behind the heavy curtains. A clock ticked on somewhere behind her, and aside from that, silence pressed around her uncomfortably. Alone in this dark, unfamiliar place, it suddenly became a necessity to find Marty.<p>

And that required sitting up.

Emma let some of the withheld sobs slip as she brought her right arm up from her side. The uninhibited limb slowly tucked itself under her ribs, the slight tensing of muscles on one side sending shards of pain into the other. A loud gasp escaped her, and she immediately let her muscles collapse. Lip quivering, she turned her face into the mattress and bit down on the blanket, muffling her cries.

Her pain had reached new heights, beyond that of initially assessing it at the DeLorean and waking up in Lorraine's bed. The adrenaline was wearing off, and the length of the day and intensity of its events were settling heavily on Emma's morale. Things were beginning to seem impossible, even that time not long ago when she firmly believed anything was possible.

_Getting out of a bed is not going to stop you._

_I can do this. I have to do this. No, I can't. Lord. Find Marty. Find Dad. Get home. _

_Get home, get home, get up and get home._

_Get up._

_Get up, get up._

Finally, summoning all of the physical strength she could against the pain, Emma gritted her teeth and shakily pushed her body upright. As her legs slid down the silky comforter to the floor, she mentally composed herself and caught her breath.

A smooth blanket fell from her bare back. The sensation widened her eyes, and she reached for the light, horrified to see the front half of her shirt still lying on the bed. Looking down at herself, Emma immediately clutched the velveteen throw to her chest. Her mind reeled for an explanation when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a large swath of white tape on top of her left shoulder.

Slowly looking back at the nightstand, Emma picked up the small white bowl on the medicine tray, her fingers curling around its lip when she saw the bullet in it.

It was no wonder her shoulder hurt as much as it did if they'd gone digging around in it for that thing.

Despite it all, her spirits lifted her cheeks with a smile.

_Thanks, Dad._

* * *

><p>Now clad in an oversized yellow button-down, Emma meandered into the sitting room in search of Marty when familiar shouting again came from the yard.<p>

Doc whirled through the back door in hysterical upset. She stepped back as he hurtled toward her, watching as he tore a framed picture of Thomas Edison from the mantle, sat it on the end stand, and fell into the chair. He groaned into his hands with no acknowledgement of her presence whatsoever.

"One point twenty-one gigawatts," he kept muttering in various pitches. "One point twenty-one gigawatts! How could I have been so careless! One point twenty-one gigawatts?"

When he started addressing the photo, Emma sat on the edge of the couch, staring at him.

Not for the first time that evening, she found herself startled to think that_ this guy _was her future father when Marty suddenly ran in.

"Doc, all we need is little plutonium."

Emmett huffed anxiously. "I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by!"

He took the kid by the shoulders, giving him a shake to make sure the message reached him full and well: "Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here."

The room fell silent.

In truth, Emma supposed she'd been waiting to hear it all day; that kind of power was intimidating in 1985, but 1955, it was just plain monstrous, even to a scientist of her father's caliber. Hearing it didn't make it any easier to digest, however, and a new sense of illness came over her. She felt Marty sink into the couch next to her, incapacitated by the birth of such a reality.

Seeing this, Emmett sighed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Hey, 1955 isn't all that bad," he said quietly. "You should be happy you ended up in a year when you knew someone."

His attempt at sympathy and optimism seemed to fall on deaf ears, and _it's no wonder_, he scolded himself. They came to him for help, and he blew up their hopes without as much as a shred of tact.

Emmett wet his lips, talking to his hands.

"Perhaps you two can stay with me until you get on your feet. Then-"

"No, Doc, come on!" Marty leapt up, shaking himself out of his stupor. "I'm not going to _settle down_ in 1955! I've got a life back in 1985! I've got a date!"

Emma sat taller at this, watching Marty tear the blue clock tower flyer from his back pocket and unfold it in a hurry, shoving Jennifer Parker's phone number under Doc's nose. Emma's skin prickled all the way up to her scalp as if acid were seeping into every one of her pores.

"Can't you just find a nice girl here?"

Emma glanced at Marty guiltily, eyes widening when he turned his head back towards her ever so slightly. When Marty didn't reply, Doc looked over at her.

"Do you have a young man back in 1985?"

Emma blinked, not sure what she had. Father gone, Marty and Jennifer...Now that she thought about it, even though she was thirty years away from home, she wasn't sure she wanted to return to what awaited her in 1985. She was pretty sure the only thing left for her would be Einstein.

"I have a dog," she ventured sheepishly.

"It's not about the girl, Doc," Marty interceded. "It's about the rest of my life, and Emma's, too." He sat on the coffee table directly in front of him, meeting his eye resolutely. "You've never let us down before. You always tell me that if I put my mind to it, I can do anything, and I know you can figure this out."

Doc shook his head, and Marty began pacing.

"It's going to take more than confidence to generate that kind of power, Marty. One point twenty-one gigawatts? The only power source capable of that is a bolt of lightning! Unfortunately, you never know when or where it's gonna strike!"

Emma's mind jumpstarted at the words, and, judging by Marty's face, they hadn't escaped him, either. She eyed the blue flyer with newfound hope as Marty extended it to Doc. Excitement kindled in her eyes as he read the flyer, and when the same flame maniacally ignited in his, the first thing she intended to do when she got back to 1985 was thank Jennifer Parker profusely for asking Marty out.

"It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 PM next Saturday night!"

She smiled as he began to fret about in the building frenzy of brainstorming, searching for and pulling words from the limitless space around him and formulating an idea.

"If we could somehow harness this lightning…_channel it _into the flux capacitor…it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!"

Marty jumped up. _I'll take it._

"Alright! Saturday's good! We can spend a week in 1955! We'll hang out, you can show us around –"

Doc suddenly gripped Marty's shoulders. "Marty, that is completely out of the question. You must not leave this _house_. You must not see anybody or talk to anybody. Anything you do could have serious repercussions on future events! Do you understand?"

Emma stared at Marty, slowly standing as he half-heartedly complied with Doc's wishes. The scientist narrowed his eyes at Marty's aloof reply, and looking back at Emma's rigid approach, his fears were all but confirmed. He pointed at Marty, a knowing smile sending Marty's gaze to the floor.

"Marty, have you interacted with anybody else today besides me?"

Marty stepped out of Doc's grasp and made the confession. "Yeah, well, I might have, sorta…bumped into my parents."

"Great Scott!" Doc spat. "Let me see that photograph of your brother!"

Marty withdrew the picture from his pocket, and the three of them crowded around it at the ivory floor lamp.

"This proves my theory," Doc said, pressing his thumb to the photo. "Look at your brother!"

Emma's face hardened at what she saw. After the day she'd had, she'd imagine this was just one more thing she was going to have to accept as really and truly happening – Marty's brother's head was gone, and Marty said as much.

"It's like it's erased."

"Erased from existence," Doc murmured cryptically.

Emma felt her stomach plummet as she stared at the photograph. If "bumping into" your parents led to an erased existence, how had she not gone up in a puff of smoke for having intentionally sought out her father?

Doc now stabbed at the picture with his finger. "Where is she?"

"Linda?"

"No, her," Doc said, pointing to Emma. "She is your sister, isn't she?"

Emma glanced at Marty before raising her eyebrows at the floor. "That seems to be what we're telling everyone."

"We told my dad that when we ran into him, and we've just stuck to it since," Marty explained. "But she's not really my sister. Just a friend."

"Then you should be fine," he said to Emma, "unless you've also –"

Emma shook her head. "No, I've…I'm good. All's well."

Doc handed Marty his picture. "Still, I wish we had your photo just to be safe."

Marty paused as he opened his wallet. "Actually…"

Emma and Doc watched as he slowly exchanged one photo for another – Emma's senior picture.

She looked at him curiously, and he shrugged with a hint of a smile as Doc took the tiny headshot from him. She said nothing, just smiled when he took a deep breath and looked away.

"Everything seems to be in order," Doc announced, returning the other photo. "Marty, you are going to get to see plenty of 1955 _just_ like you wanted."

He didn't like the tone of Doc's voice. "Yeah?"

"You are introducing your parents to each other first thing Monday morning in school unless you want to disappear from that photograph with your brother and sister," he said sternly. "Now, we'll see to the details tomorrow, but you need to understand the jeopardy you're in right now. We have less than a week to work with."

Marty nodded uneasily. "I got it, Doc."

"As for you," Emmett said, taking Emma by her good arm, "you'll need a lot of rest to recover. I'll fix up a guest room for you tomorrow, and in the meantime, you can sleep in my room."

That sounded like a _terrible _idea.

Emma shook her head quickly as Marty accepted the couch for the evening. The more time she spent around her father, the better the likelihood something would slip and tip him off about her true identity. Even if he was in the lab all day and she locked herself in a room, she could hear her dad's voice of reason opposing the situation if he were faced with it. And she wasn't ready to explain something to this guy that she was barely wrapping her own head around. She needed as long of a leash as she could get.

"I can't just stay here," she blurted out. "Marty's parents saw me and know me now."

"All the more reason not to interfere further," Emmett said.

"It's too late for that! But now I can help things along."

"And we could use all the help we can get," Marty added.

There was no way Emma was sitting this week out while he gallivanted around by himself. Knowing his luck, he'd further endanger his existence without someone with him in the field. If one could endanger their existence beyond erasing it, that is.

Emmett began to guide Emma towards the staircase. "I'm going to have an acquaintance of mine come look at your shoulder tonight before we make any decisions. If all goes accordingly, I'll consider it."

"You'll _allow_ it."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

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